A Book that Was Lost

To Father’s House

1

Close to the Passover holiday it happened. I was far away from my father’s house and my home town, and I was going about my work, which has neither beginning nor end, work which you start to no advantage and which never sets you free. Two men smeared with plaster and paint arrived, one of them holding a ladder. Actually I should say that the ladder stood by itself and he, that is, this man with the ladder, weaved his arms through the rungs. I asked them, “What do you want?” They told me, “We were sent here to whitewash the room.”

I was involved in my work, and it was difficult for me to stop. Yet I was bothered not so much by the interruption as by the dirt, for these painters certainly would not go out of their way to spread a sheet over the books, and protect them from being soiled.

To avoid their reading my thoughts, I pretended not to see them and stared at a hole in the wall, near the ceiling. Straw and palm — branches hanging down from the ceiling covered the hole, and flies and mosquitoes clustered there. I said to myself, What do you gain with your windows screened if flies and mosquitoes come in through that hole?

I left the workers and went up to the attic, to clear away the straw and palm — branches so that the hole would be readily visible until I could find a board to cover it.

My little niece came to help me. For some reason which is beyond me, I scolded her: “I don’t need you and the likes of you!” She shrugged her shoulders and disappeared.

Meanwhile, the workers began acting in my room as if it belonged to them. I thought to myself, I’m superfluous here, and I can’t do my work, so I’ll go to my home town, to my father’s house. I haven’t seen my father for many years now, and I haven’t fulfilled the commandment of respect for Father. At the railroad station I boarded a train going to my town. Through no fault of my own, the train was delayed on the way, and when I reached town the festival had already begun; it was Passover night.

2

Passover night had come, and I had come to my home town. Since it was time for prayer, I went to pray, but I did not go where my father usually prays, for if he should see me so suddenly it would confuse his praying.

When I reached the courtyard of the House of Prayer I hesitated slightly, because I saw a lighted candle suspended in the air in a bottle swinging in the wind but not extinguished, and because at that moment one of the men whose avocation is interpreting the Bible — Isaac Euchel by name — came over to show me an explanation of a difficult verse at the end of the book of Joshua, or perhaps it was the beginning of the book of Hosea. Isaac Euchel’s explanation was a bit forced, and medieval commentators had already interpreted the verse in a simple style and in clear, lucid language. Nevertheless, I nodded my head, as if the world needed his interpretation.

While talking, he took out a cigarette and asked for a light. A child came over to light a match, but it went out. He took another match and gave it to me, saying “Give it to that gentleman there.” I told Isaac Euchel, “Your generation, with all its expertise in grammar, didn’t know how to adorn this splinter with a word as suitable as ‘match.’” And when I had said this it occurred to me he would answer that since there had been no matches in his day there had been no need for this word. Euchel took the match and said, “Now, then, we can make a flame with this metch” (he said “metch,” with an “e” not an “a”). “But what good is a metch which goes out before serving its purpose?”

Alas, I tried to outsmart him and I was outsmarted.

3

I do not remember how we took leave of each other. When I left him, I found myself standing in a large room which had a set table, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it. And two women were standing there, one old and one young. And a candle was suspended in the air in a bottle, like the one I had seen in the courtyard of the House of Prayer. Or perhaps there were two candles which seemed to be one. The room opened directly onto the street, with two doorways facing each other. I turned to the doorway facing my father’s house and started to leave.

The old woman said, “Is that the way it’s done, coming in and going out?” I realized that I had come upon an inn and that they had made no profit from me. Placing my hand over my heart as an oath and a promise, I said, “Believe me, I’ll come again.”

The old woman’s face lit up. “I know, sir, that you will keep your promise.” I nodded my head, saying to myself, “I only hope I don’t forget, I only hope I don’t forget,” even though it is difficult to keep such a promise. First of all, I had come to my father’s town and my father certainly would insist that I stay at home, and not allow me to go to inns or hotels. And second — I’ve forgotten the second reason.

When I took leave of the old woman I started to run, for it was Father’s custom to sit down to the Passover meal immediately following services. While I was running, it occurred to me that I might have passed his house. I raised my eyes to see. My eyes shut themselves firmly, and I did not see a thing. With great effort I opened them just a narrow crack, and saw three or four men running in haste and confusion. I meant to ask them where my father’s house was, but they were strangers, even though they were dressed like the men of my town. I let them pass, without asking them.

Time does not stand still, but I was standing still, seeking my father’s house, not knowing where it was. For I had not been in the town in many years and I had forgotten many of its roads, and the town itself had changed somewhat. Then I remembered that Father lived next to a man who was known by everyone.

I looked for someone who would tell me where the house was. My eyes shut themselves again. With all my might I struggled to open them. They opened just a narrow crack again. The moon came out, to shine upon them dust and ashes. I saw a little girl. Pointing with her finger, she said, “That’s it.” I wanted to ask her, “How do you know what I am looking for?” My eyes opened and I saw Father, holding his cup of wine, about to chant the blessing over the wine, hesitating, waiting.

Afraid that I might disturb the quiet of the house, I wanted to explain to Father, letting my eyes speak for me, telling him why I had delayed coming for so long. My eyes closed again. Struggling, I opened them. Suddenly I heard a noise like that of a sheet being torn. Actually, no sheet was being torn, but one small cloud high above was being torn, and once it was torn the moon came out, splitting the clouds, and a sweet light shone upon the house and upon Father.

The Document

Three days I spent in the office of the gray bureau. A certain relative, whose name I didn’t even recognize, had written to me from a certain city I’d never heard of, asking me to go to a certain office and obtain for him such-and-such a document on which his whole life depended.

My throat was sore — and my whole body. Just the same, I got up very early and went to get my relative’s document — thinking all the time that I would find it immediately and then go back to bed. I was fighting a cold which had troubled me all winter and which had returned that day with renewed force. I entered the office humbly and timidly. As I had gotten up early and not a soul was there before me, I was sure there would be no long delay before they gave me the document.

At that hour the cleaning woman was sweeping the building and raising clouds of dust. My lungs became blocked and my voice choked off. I said to myself, I’d better wait a minute until my throat clears; otherwise the official won’t know what I want, and all my efforts will be wasted.

As I was standing, the office suddenly filled with hordes of people pushing one another, standing in angry, sullen compliance, and looking avidly toward the men and women clerks who sat at their battered desks scratching away with gray pens on pads and ledgers. I too was pushed first to this clerk and then to another, and I kept my head lowered timidly in the hope they would turn to me and ask what I want. But they paid no attention to me and of course asked me nothing. This was all to the good, for had they asked I doubt whether I could have said a word with all that dust clogging my throat.

So one day passed and so a second. From dawn to dusk I stood in that office. My feet became leaden and my spirit exhausted. Occasionally I was moved from one spot to another, from one room to another; I stood before this clerk or that clerk; I was pushed again and returned to the room from which I started. The clerks sat on — their faces bent over their papers and their pens writing automatically, incessantly. The clock ticked gloomily away. Its hand moved slowly, and a dead fly was stuck to it and moved along with it.

On the third day things got a little better for me. A new clerk came in to replace one of the clerks who had died. This new clerk, by the name of Nahman Horodenker, was a blond, well-built youth with clear spectacles over his good eyes. From his name and facial expression, as from his bear-like movements, I could tell that he was a countryman of mine. All I had to do was announce publicly that he was a Galician Jew, and immediately I would have had the upper hand. But some indefinable misgiving, something like conscience, stopped me. I swallowed my words and was silent.

Meanwhile I was getting sicker and sicker, and I could think of nothing else. I had been ill twice that winter, and each time the first symptoms had been the same — a swelling of the tongue, a tickle in the throat, dry and cracked lips. Now the symptoms were appearing again. My eyes blurred, my forehead began to sweat, and my throat became hoarse. I took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it. Without waiting to finish, I lit another. I had already forgotten why I had come to this office, and why I was standing here, and why I was being pushed and was running from room to room and from clerk to clerk.

Suddenly I heard a noise and felt my left foot expanding in its shoe. I looked down and saw that the shoe lace had snapped, but before I had a chance to tie it, they called my name. Looking up, I saw a man sitting alone at a small table covered with a soiled black oilcloth, and with files of papers to his right and left; his eyes smiled in his bent head.

I relaxed and rejoiced as one does in recognizing a man one knew before the war. It was the druggist of the municipal hospital in my home town, who always had a glass of soda to offer me whenever I came to visit a sick friend. The druggist looked up and motioned me to be seated. This gesture of compassion touched me, yet I didn’t feel right about sitting down because of the papers that were on the chair. He took out a bar of chocolate and offered it to me.

I said to myself, It’s now three days and three nights that I haven’t seen my wife and children, and they’re undoubtedly complaining about me; now I’ll be able to placate them with some chocolate.

As I stretched out my hand to take it, though, I saw that the druggist had not intended to give me the whole piece. I became ashamed of my greediness, I blushed and lowered my eyes.

Slowly looking up I saw some professor sitting to the right of my acquaintance. He had a short, blond beard, a cane rested between his knees, and a hidden sneer played on his lips. I nodded and greeted him.

At this he grasped my hands and informed me that he had ingeniously solved a great problem. That letter “L” in a certain word, which everyone mistakenly believes to be part of its root, is not etymologically related to the word and should be substituted with another letter.

The professor’s pronouncement was clear to me and the word he was talking about was completely explained. Yet, I was puzzled by a different problem of phonology…

In the meantime the day had cleared up, and I knew that in a certain spot near the edge of the table my acquaintance had left me a piece of bread — except that I couldn’t tell where it was. But in any case, the mass of people had begun once again its squeezing and shoving. I was pushed outside and found myself standing on a large balcony floating on an endless ocean.

Friendship

My wife had returned from a journey, and I was very happy. But a tinge of sadness mingled with my joy, for the neighbors might come and bother us. “Let us go and visit Mr. So-and-so, or Mrs. Such-and-such,” I said to my wife, “for if they come to us we shall not get rid of them in a hurry, but if we go to them we can get up and be rid of them whenever we like.”

So we lost no time and went to visit Mrs. Klingel. Because Mrs. Klingel was in the habit of coming to us, we went to her first.

Mrs. Klingel was a famous woman and had been principal of a school before the war. When the world went topsy-turvy, she fell from her high estate and became an ordinary teacher. But she was still very conscious of her own importance and talked to people in her characteristic patronizing tone. If anyone acquired a reputation, she would seek his acquaintance and become a frequent visitor in his house. My wife had known her when she was a principal, and she clung to my wife as she clung to anyone who had seen her in her prime. She was extremely friendly to my wife and used to call her by her first name. I too had known Mrs. Klingel in her prime, but I doubt whether I had talked to her. Before the war, when people were not yet hostile to each other, a man could meet his neighbor and regard him as his friend even if he did not talk to him.

Mrs. Klingel was lying in bed. Not far away, on a velvet covered couch, sat three of her woman friends whom I did not know.

When I came in I greeted each of them, but I did not tell them my name or trouble myself to listen to theirs.

Mrs. Klingel smiled at us affectionately and went on chattering as usual. I held my tongue and said to myself: I have really nothing against her, but she is a nuisance. I shall be walking in the street one day, not wanting anyone to notice me, when suddenly this woman will come up to me and I will ask her how she is and be distracted from my thoughts. Because I knew her several years ago, does that mean that I belong to her all my life? I was smouldering with anger, and I did not tell myself: If you come across someone and you do not know what connection there is between you, you should realize that you have not done your duty to him previously and you have both been brought back into the world to put right the wrong you did to your neighbor in another incarnation.

As I sat nursing my anger, Mrs. Klingel said to my wife, “You were away, my dear, and in the meantime your husband spent his nights in pleasure.” As she spoke, she shook her finger at me and said, laughingly, “I am not telling your wife that pretty girls came to visit you.”

Nothing had been further from my thoughts in those days than pleasure. Even in my dreams there was nothing to give me pleasure, and now this woman tells my wife, “Your husband had visits from pretty girls, your husband took his pleasure with them.” I was so furious that my very bones trembled. I jumped up and showered her with abuse. Every opprobrious word I knew I threw in her face. My wife and she looked at me in wonderment. And I wondered at myself too, for after all Mrs. Klingel had only been joking, and why should I flare up and insult her in this way? But I was boiling with anger, and every word I uttered was either a curse or an insult. Finally I took my wife by the arm and left without a farewell.

On my way out I brushed past Mrs. Klingel’s three friends, and I believe I heard one saying to the other, “That was a strange joke of Mrs. Klingel’s.”

My wife trailed along behind me. From her silence it was obvious that she was distressed, not so much because I had shamed Mrs. Klingel but because I had fallen into a rage. But she was silent out of love, and said nothing at all.

So we walked on without uttering a word. We ran into three men. I knew one of them, but not the other two. The one I knew had been a Hebrew teacher, who had gone abroad and come back rich; now he spent his time stuffing the periodicals with his verbiage. These teachers, even if their pupils have grown up, still treat them as schoolmasters do and teach them things of no importance. But in one of his articles I had found a good thing, and now we had met I paid him a compliment. His face lit up and he presented me to his companions, one of whom had been a senator in Poland, while the other was the brother of one of Mrs. Klingel’s three friends — or perhaps I am mistaken and she has no brother.

I should have asked the distinguished visitors if they liked the city, and so forth, but my wife was tired from the journey and still distressed, and it was hard to stop. So I cut the conversation short and took my leave.

My wife had already gone off without waiting for me. I was not angry at her for not waiting. It is hard for a young woman to stand and show herself to people when she is sad and weary.

While I was walking, I put my hand in my pocket and took out an envelope or a letter, and stopped to read: “The main trial of Job was not that of Job, but of the Holy One, blessed be He, as it were, because He had handed over His servant Job to Satan’s power. That is, God’s trial was greater than Job’s: He had a perfect and upright man, and He placed him in the power of Satan.” After reading what I had written, I tore up the envelope and the letter, and scattered the pieces to the wind, as I usually do to every letter, sometimes before I read it and sometimes at the time of reading.

After I had done this, I said to myself: I must find my wife. My thoughts had distracted me and I had strayed from the road; I now found myself suddenly standing in a street where I had never been before. It was no different from all the other streets in the city, but I knew I had strayed to a place I did not know. By this time all the shops were locked up, and little lamps shone in the windows among all kinds of commodities. I saw that I had strayed far from home, and I knew I must go by a different road, but I did not know which. I looked at a stairway bounded on both sides by an iron fence and went up until I reached a flower shop. There I found a small group of men standing with their backs to the flowers, and Dr. Rischel standing among them, offering them his new ideas on grammar and language.

I greeted him and asked: “Which way to…” but before I could say the name of the street I started to stammer. I had not forgotten the name of the street, but I could not get the words out of my mouth.

It is easy to understand a man’s feelings when he is looking for the place where he lives but, when he is about to ask, cannot pronounce the name. However, I took heart and pretended I was joking. Suddenly I was covered in a cold sweat. What I wanted to conceal I was compelled to reveal. When I asked again where the street was, the same thing happened again.

Dr. Rischel stood there amazed: he was in the midst of expounding his new ideas, and I had come along and interrupted him. Meanwhile, his companions had gone away, looking at me mockingly as they left. I looked this way and that. I tried to remember the name of my street, but could not. Sometimes I thought the name of the street was Humboldt and sometimes that it was West Street. But as soon as I opened my mouth to ask I knew that its name was neither Humboldt nor West. I put my hand in my pocket, hoping to find a letter on which I would see my address. I found two letters I had not yet torn up, but one had been sent to my old home, which I had left, and another was addressed poste restante. I had received only one letter in this house where I was living, and I had torn it up a short time before. I started reciting aloud names of towns and villages, kings and nobles, sages and poets, trees and flowers, every kind of street name: perhaps I would remember the name of my street — but I could not recall it.

Dr. Rischel’s patience had worn out, and he started scraping the ground with his feet. I am in trouble and he wants to leave me, I said to myself. We are friends, we are human beings, aren’t we? How can you leave a man in such distress? Today my wife came back from a journey and I cannot reach her, for the trivial reason that I have forgotten where I live. “Get into a streetcar and come with me,” said Dr. Rischel. I wondered why he was giving me such unsuitable advice. He took me by the arm and got in with me.

I rode on against my will, wondering why Rischel had seen fit to drag me into this tramcar. Not only was it not bringing me home, but it was taking me further away from my own street. I remembered that I had seen Rischel in a dream wrestling with me. I jumped off the tramcar and left him.

When I jumped off the car I found myself standing by the post office. An idea came into my head: to ask for my address there. But my head replied: Be careful, the clerk may think you are crazy, for a sane man usually knows where he lives. So I asked a man I found there to ask the clerk.

In came a fat, well-dressed man, an insurance agent, rubbing his hands in pleasure and satisfaction, who buttonholed him and interrupted him with his talk. My blood boiled with indignation. “Have you no manners?” I said to him. “When two people are talking, what right have you to interrupt them?” I knew I was not behaving well, but I was in a temper and completely forgot my manners. The agent looked at me in surprise, as if saying: What have I done to you? Why should you insult me? I knew that if I was silent he would have the best of the argument, so I started shouting again, “I’ve got to go home, I’m looking for my house, I’ve forgotten the name of my street, and I don’t know how to get to my wife!” He began to snigger, and so did the others who had gathered at the sound of my voice. Meanwhile, the clerk had closed his window and gone away, without my knowing my address.

Opposite the post office stood a coffeehouse. There I saw Mr. Jacob Tzorev. Mr. Jacob Tzorev had been a banker in another city; I had known him before the war. When I went abroad, and he heard I was in difficulties, he had sent me money. Since paying the debt I had never written to him. I used to say: Any day now I will return to the Land of Israel and make it up with him. Meanwhile, twenty years had passed and we had not met. Now that I saw him I rushed into the coffeehouse and gripped both his arms from behind, clinging to them joyfully and calling him by name. He turned his head toward me but said nothing. I wondered why he was silent and showed me no sign of friendship. Didn’t he see how much I liked him, how much I loved him?

A young man whispered to me, “Father is blind.” I looked and saw that he was blind in both his eyes. It was hard for me not to rejoice in my friend, and hard to rejoice in him, for when I had left him and gone abroad there had been light in his eyes, but now they were blind.

I wanted to ask how he was, and how his wife was. But when I started to speak I spoke about my home. Two wrinkles appeared under his eyes, and it looked as if he were peeping out of them. Suddenly he groped with his hands, turned toward his son, and said, “This gentleman was my friend.” I nodded and said, “Yes, that’s right, I was your friend and I am your friend.” But neither his father’s words nor my own made any impression on the son, and he paid no attention to me. After a brief pause, Mr. Tzorev said to his son, “Go and help him find his home.”

The young man stood still for a while. It was obvious that he found it hard to leave his father alone. Finally the father opened his eyes and gazed at me. His two beautiful eyes shone, and I saw myself standing beside my home.

Metamorphosis

1

She was wearing a brown dress, and her warm, brown eyes were moist. As she came out of the rabbi’s house with the bill of divorcement in her hand, she found fair-haired Svirsh and Dr. Tenzer waiting for her, two bachelors who had been friendly with her since the first year of her marriage. Through the tears on her lashes, she could see how overjoyed they were: not even in their dreams had they pictured the happy day when Toni Hartmann would be parted from her husband. They both sprang eagerly toward her and clasped her hands, Then Svirsh took the parasol, hung it from her belt, and, taking both her hands in his, swung them affectionately back and forth. Next Tenzer took them in his large, clammy hands and gazed at her with the cold, furtive look of a sensualist who is uncertain of his pleasures. Toni withdrew her tired hands from them both and wiped her eyes.

Svirsh took her arm in his and prepared to accompany her. Tenzer stationed himself on her right and thought: That albino has got in first. But never mind; if it’s him today it’ll be me tomorrow. And he derived a kind of intellectual satisfaction from the thought that tomorrow he would be walking with Toni, who had been Hartmann’s yesterday, and who was Svirsh’s today.

As they were about to go, Hartmann emerged from the rabbi’s house. His face was lined and his forehead furrowed. For a moment he stood there looking about him like someone who has just come out of the dark and is wondering which way to go. Catching sight of Toni with the two men, he looked at her with his hard, tired eyes. “Going with them?” he asked. Toni lifted her veil to her forehead and said, “Don’t you want me to?” Her voice sent a tremor through him. He linked his thumbs one in the other and said, “Don’t go with them.” Toni crumpled her handkerchief in her hand, raised her sad eyes, and stood looking at him helplessly. Her entire appearance seemed to say, “Do I look as if I could go alone?”

He went up to Toni. Svirsh drew back and let her arm fall. Tenzer, who was taller than Hartmann, drew himself up bravely to his full height. But he soon lowered his head and relaxed his posture. He said to himself, “After all, it wasn’t from me that he took her.” Waving his hat, he walked off as his friend Svirsh had done — humming a little impromptu tune as he went.

As they went, they looked over their shoulders at the man who had been Toni’s husband. Svirsh mumbled petulantly: “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.” Tenzer broke off his tune and wiped his heavy spectacles. “By the Pope’s slipper,” he said, “it’s enough to make Mohammed wag his beard.” Svirsh shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips, but at Hartmann’s anger rather than at Tenzer’s levity.

Left alone with Toni, Hartmann made as if to take her arm, but desisted, so that she should not feel his agitation. For a moment or two they stood silently together. The whole business of the divorce had suddenly become very real, as if they were still standing in front of the rabbi, and the old man’s bleating voice were still ringing in their ears. Toni gripped her handkerchief tightly and checked her tears with an effort. Hartmann removed his hat for relief. Why are we standing here? he asked himself. Once again he heard bleating in his ears — not the rabbi’s voice, but that of the scribe who had read out the bill of divorce, and he thought there was a mistake in it. Why was the wretched man in such a hurry? Because Toni and I…The whole thing was so strange. But as Hartmann could not define exactly what it was that was so strange, he became confused. He felt he must do something. He crumpled his hat and waved it about. Then he smoothed out the creases, crumpled it again, put his hat back on his head, and passed his hands over his face, from temples to chin. He could feel the stubble on his face: in his preoccupation with the divorce, he had forgotten to shave. What a disgusting sight I must look to Toni, he thought. Ausgerechnet heute — today of all days, he muttered between his teeth. He consoled himself with the thought that, although the greater part of the day was over, his beard was not yet noticeable. At the same time he was dissatisfied with himself for seeking lame excuses for his negligence. “Let’s go,” he said to Toni. “Let’s go,” he repeated, not certain whether he had uttered the words the first time or, if so, whether she had heard them.

The sun betook itself elsewhere. A spirit of gloom brooded over the street, and a harsh melancholy groaned among the paving stones. The windows looked out from the walls of the houses, strangers to themselves and to the houses. Hartmann fixed his gaze on a window being opened across the way, trying to remember what it was he had wanted to say. He saw a woman peeping out. That’s not what I meant, he thought, and he began talking, not about what he’d been thinking, but about something quite different. And after every two or three words he waved his hand despairingly at the things that were coming into his mouth and that he was laying before Toni. Toni fixed her eyes on his mouth and thought: What is he trying to say? Her gaze followed his hand as she tried to fathom his meaning. His conversation was generally not beyond her understanding; if only he would speak coherently and calmly, she would understand everything. Her mouth quivered. The new crease on her upper lip, near the right hand corner, twitched involuntarily. As she smoothed it with her tongue she thought: God in Heaven, how sad he is. Perhaps he has reminded himself of his daughters.

Hartmann had indeed reminded himself of his daughters: they had not been out of his thoughts all day. Although he had not mentioned them to Toni, not even indirectly, he was constantly thinking of them, now of the two of them together, now of each one separately. Beate, the elder, was nine, and she was old enough to realize that Daddy and Mummy were angry with one another. But Renate, who was only seven, had not yet noticed anything. When the atmosphere at home had become too strained, Toni’s aunt had come and taken the children to live with her in the country, and they didn’t know that Daddy and Mummy…. Before Hartmann could pursue his thought to the end, he saw Beate’s eyes, the way they had looked when she had seen Daddy and Mummy quarreling for the first time, Her childish curiosity had been mingled with dull surprise at the sight of grownups quarreling. Hartmann had hung his head before his daughter’s eyes as they grew dark with sorrow and her mouth assumed an expression of voiceless anguish. Then she had lowered her eyelashes and gone out.

Once again Hartmann felt the need to do something. Not knowing what to do, he removed his hat, mopped his brow, wiped the leather band inside his hat, and put it back on his head. Toni grew sad: she felt as if she were responsible for all his troubles. She took the parasol which Svirsh had hung from her belt and toyed with it. Meanwhile Hartmann had begun talking again. He made no reference whatever to the day’s events, but they were all reflected in his voice. Toni answered him vaguely. If she were aware of what she was saying, she would have noticed that she, too, was talking to no particular purpose. But Hartmann accepted her replies as if they were to the point.

A little girl approached them and held out a bunch of asters to Hartmann. Perceiving her intention, he took out his purse and threw her a silver coin. The child put the coin in her mouth but did not move. Hartmann looked at Toni inquiringly: What could the child be wanting now? Toni stretched out her hand and took the flowers, inhaled their scent, and said, “Thank you, my dear.” The girl twisted one leg around the other, rocked back and forth, and then went away. Toni looked affectionately at her retreating figure, a sad smile on her lips. “Ah,” said Hartmann smiling, “she’s an honest little trader. If she gets money, she has to give goods in exchange. Well, this is one transaction I’ve emerged from safely.”

Toni thought: He says, this is one transaction he’s emerged from safely; that means there was another transaction he didn’t emerge from safely. She raised her eyes to him, even though she knew that he was not in the habit of talking to her about his business affairs. But this time he opened his heart, and without any prompting began discussing business. He was involved in transactions he had entered into unwillingly, and now he could not extricate himself. These had led to disputes, quarrels and fights with partners and agents, who had bought merchandise with his money and, on seeing they were likely to incur a loss, had debited the amount to him.

Hartmann had started in the middle, like one who is preoccupied and talks of the things that are weighing on his mind. A person unfamiliar with the world of commerce could not have made head or tail of what he was saying, and Toni certainly knew nothing about business. But he ignored this and went on talking. The more he talked, the more confused he made matters sound, until his patience gave way completely, and he began to vent his anger on his agents, on whom he had relied as he relied on himself and who had betrayed his trust, causing him financial loss and involving him in degrading fights and disputes. He still didn’t know how to get rid of them.

Realizing that Toni was listening now, he went back and began from the beginning, carefully explaining each point to her. He now clarified what he had left unexplained in the first telling, and what he did not explain as he went along, he made clear later. Toni began to get the drift of his story, and what she did not grasp with her mind, her heart understood. She looked at him with concern, and wondered how he could bear so many worries without anyone to share them. Hartmann became conscious of her gaze and recounted the entire story in brief. Suddenly he realized that he was seeing his affairs in a new light. Although he had not intentionally set out to prove himself in the right, matters now seemed clearer to him, and he saw that the problem was after all not so insoluble as he had thought.

Toni listened attentively to all he said and realized that his angry mood had been due entirely to his business worries. She applied her new knowledge to the other matter, to the divorce. It was as if he had said, “Now you know why I have been so short-tempered, now you know why we have come to this, to getting divorced, I mean.”

Toni was thinking about the divorce and the period leading up to it, but she did not divert her attention from what he was saying. She lifted her brown eyes, which were full of trust and confidence, and said, “Michael, I’m sure you’ll find a suitable way out of it.” She looked at him again, trusting and submissive, as if it were not he but she who was in trouble, and as if it were she who was seeking help from him. He looked at her as he had not looked at her for a long time past, and he beheld her as he had not beheld her for a long time past. She was a head shorter than he. Her shoulders had grown so thin that they stuck out. She was wearing a smooth brown dress, open at the shoulders but fastened with rings of brown silk through which two white spots were visible. With difficulty he kept himself from caressing her.

2

Hartmann had not been in the habit of talking to his wife much, least of all about business. From the day he had built his house he had tried to keep home and office completely separate. But business has a way of not letting itself be shaken off. Sometimes he would enter the house looking worried. At first, when their love was still strong, he would fob Toni off with a kiss when she asked him to tell her what was worrying him. At a later stage, he would change the subject. Later still, he would scold her: “Isn’t it bad enough that I have worries outside? Do you have to go and drag them into the house? When a man’s at home he wants to take his mind off business worries.”

But a man cannot control his thoughts, and they would come crowding in on him, turning his home into a branch of his shop. The difference was that when he was in the shop, his business affairs got the better of his thoughts, while at home his thoughts got the better of him. His father had not left him any inheritance, nor had his wife brought him a dowry; whatever he had acquired had been the result of his own exertions. He applied himself to business and kept away from other matters. That is how it: had been both before and after his marriage. While still a bachelor he had thought: I’ll get married, build a home, and find contentment there; but when he did get married and built a home, he found himself stripped of all his expectations. At first he had solaced himself with hope, but now even that was gone. True, his wife did her best to please him, and the daughters she had borne him were growing up. On the face of it, he had no complaints against his home; the trouble was that he did not know what to do with himself there. At first he had numerous friends, but as time went on he had lost interest in them: it seemed to him that they only came on Toni’s account. At first he used to look at the books Toni read and tried to keep up with them. But after reading three or four books, he stopped: the love affairs, dresses, plots, and sentiment with which they were filled — what need had an intelligent man to know of such matters? Would I care to hob-nob with such characters?

From the books he drew inferences about Toni, and from Toni about the whole house. Since he knew only his shop and was not in the habit of frequenting clubs, he had no recourse after locking up his shop but to return home. And since, once at home, he did not know what to do, he grew disgusted with himself. He began to find solace in smoking. At first he smoked in order to smother his thoughts; and he went on smoking because they were smothered. He began with cigarettes, and went on to cigars. At first he smoked in moderation, but later took to smoking continuously, until the whole house was filled with the smell of tobacco. He did not consider that he was in any way harming himself; on the contrary, he congratulated himself on the fact that he was sitting quietly by himself and not demanding anything of others. Every man has his form of pleasure: I derive mine from smoking, she derives hers from other sources. And since he didn’t trouble to discover what her form of pleasure was, and he failed to find satisfaction in his own, he became troubled at heart and began to be jealous on her account of every man, woman, and child — in fact, of everything. If he saw her talking to a man or chatting with a woman or playing with a child, he would say: Has she no husband or children of her own that she has to chase about after others?

Michael Hartmann was a merchant, and he sold his goods by weight and by measure: he knew that to waste a measure meant losing it. Eventually he reconciled himself to the situation, not because he condoned her activities, but because she had come to assume less importance in his eyes.

3

The sun was about to set. In the fields the wheat swayed silently, and the sunflowers gazed one-eyed out of their darkening yellow faces. Hartmann stretched his hand out into the vacant air and caressed Toni’s shadow.

All around him the silence was complete. Toni took the parasol and poked at the ground in front of her. Her action seemed devoid of both purpose and grace, and that bothered him. Once again he extended his hand and caressed the air. By now the sun had ended its course and the sky had become dulled. The countryside took on an appearance of desolation, and the trees in the field grew dark. The air began to grow cool, and the cucumber beds were fragrant. High up in the sky was a tiny star, the size of a pinhead. Behind it another star made its way through the clouds and began shining, and other stars followed.

The houses and barns stood in comfortable silence, and the smell of burnt weeds and of cattle rose from the pasture. Michael and Toni walked along silently. A boy and a girl sat with their arms twined about each other, talking; then their voices broke off abruptly, and the scent of hidden desire hung in the air. A light breeze sprang up, but no sound was heard. A little boy ran past holding a burning torch. He too had run like that in his childhood once, when his mother had found herself without matches and had sent him over to the neighbor’s to fetch a light. He took out a cigarette and was about to light it; but the scent of the fields took away his desire to smoke. He crumbled the cigarette between his fingers and threw it away. He smelled his fingers and wrinkled his nose.

Toni opened her handbag, took out a bottle of scent, and sprinkled her hands with it. The scent reached his nostrils and put him in a good mood. So, so, he said to himself, by way of assent or as a question.

After his talk with Toni, in which he had told her all about that business, he began chiding himself for never, in all those years, discussing his affairs with her. If he had not snapped at her every time she wanted to know something about his doings, perhaps her interests would have grown closer to his, and they would not have come to regard themselves as such strangers to one another. This lesson was good for him at the moment, since it enabled him to blame himself and to justify Toni.

Again he folded his thumbs together and said, “I can’t stand that Svirsh.”

Toni hung her head and said nothing.

Hartmann repeated: “I simply can’t stand him.”

“And Dr. Tenzer?” Toni asked softly.

“Dr. Ten-zer?” said Hartmann angrily, stressing each syllable of the name. “I hate all the Tenzers of this world. They never seem to try and get anything for themselves. All they ever do is lie in wait for things meant for other people. I know what that fellow Svirsh is after. Whenever I see those pink eyes of his and his manicured nails, I know at once what he wants. But with Tenzer you never know where you are. He makes himself out to be in love with the whole world, but in reality he doesn’t love anything. He runs after women, but he doesn’t love any woman for herself, because she’s pretty, or because she’s this or that, but because she’s another man’s wife. The very fact that someone else has an interest in her makes her desirable to Tenzer.”

Toni lifted her face toward Michael. It was night, and he could not see her eyes, but he felt that they were thanking him, as if he had taught her things she could never have learned by herself. Hartmann, who had been angry with himself for mentioning Svirsh and Tenzer, now experienced a feeling of relief, and he looked about him with a sense of freedom and happiness. He saw a light glimmering in the darkness. He stretched out his arm and, beckoning Toni with his finger, said: “Do you see the light?” Toni looked and said: “Where?” “Really, really, I can see the glimmer of a light over there,” he said. “It’s the lamp of an inn.” “Is that so,” Toni replied, “I thought it was a firefly.”

A slight shudder ran through Toni, giving her a mysteriously pleasant sensation. Hartmann’s saying it was the lamp of an inn and not a firefly suddenly set her musing about the first firefly she had ever seen. She had been on a visit to her aunt’s in the country. It was Sabbath, and she was sitting in the garden at dusk. A spark darted through the gloom and settled on her aunt’s hat. Not knowing it was a firefly, she thought it was fire and became frightened. How old had she been at the time? About seven. Now Beate and Renate were at her aunt’s, and she, Toni, was here walking with their father.

“We can rest there and have something to eat,” Hartmann said. “You must be hungry: you had no lunch. We won’t get roast duck there, but at least we can have a meal and rest.”

Toni nodded in agreement. She was thinking, When did I recollect the firefly: when Michael pointed to the light, or when I said I thought it was a firefly? But she felt she must have been thinking about the firefly before, as she had been thinking about her daughters in the country. She shivered, as if the incident had taken place only now.

The road twisted and turned, now to the right, now to the left. The inn lamp kept on vanishing and reappearing. A moist smell rose from the earth. Toni shivered a little, though she did not actually feel cold. She gazed silently into the darkness which was shrouding both her and Michael. Once more the inn lamp came into view, only to disappear a moment later. Toni drew in her shoulders, and a breeze passed across her body.

“Cold?” Hartmann asked solicitously.

“I think I see people coming.”

“There is no one here, but perhaps.”

“I’ve never seen such a tall person before,” said Toni, “Do look.” A man with a ladder came toward them. Placing the ladder on the ground, he climbed it and lit a lamp. Toni blinked her eyes and drew in her breath. “Was there something you wanted to say?” Michael asked her. She looked down and said: “I didn’t say anything.”

Hartmann smiled. “That’s strange, I fancied you wanted to say something.”

Toni blushed. “Did I want to say something?” She looked at her shadow in silence.

Hartmann smiled again: “So you didn’t want to say anything. But I thought you did.”

Toni walked on silently at Michael’s side.

Two shadows became visible. The head of one of them was close to Toni’s, while the other was close to Hartmann’s. Two young people came in sight, a boy and a girl. The whole air became charged with their unfulfilled desires. Hartmann looked at them, and they at him. Toni lowered her head and looked at her wedding ring.

4

A little later they came to a garden fenced on three sides. The gate was open, and to the right of it shone a lamp. Some smaller lanterns, in the shape of apples and pears, hung from the trees in the garden. Hartman looked at the sign and said: “I wasn’t mistaken, this is a restaurant. We’ll get something to eat here.” Taking Toni by the arm, he walked in with her.

A plump, loose-limbed girl was sitting in front of the house, cleaning vegetables and occupying half the width of the bottom step. She greeted them in a loud voice and lowered her skirt. Hartmann thought: She’s red-haired and freckled. Although I can’t see her in the dark, I’ve a feeling that’s the type she is. Toni shook her head at him. He gazed at her in astonishment. Could she possibly have sensed what I was thinking? He took her parasol and laid it on a chair, and placed his hat on top of it. “Let’s sit in the garden,” he said, “or would you prefer to eat indoors?” “No,” Toni replied, “let’s eat out here.”

A waiter came up, wiped the top of the table, spread a cloth on it, and handed them a menu. Then he fetched a glass of water and put the flowers in it, and stood waiting until they were ready with their order. Hartmann saw that most of the dishes listed in the menu had been struck out. He grumbled: “Most of the dishes have already been eaten up.” Looking over Hartmann’s shoulder, the waiter said: “I’ll bring you some others immediately.” “You’re hiding your wares under a bushel,” said Hartmann. The waiter bent down and said: “The dishes we have struck out have all been eaten. Others have been cooked instead, but we haven’t had time to enter them in the menu.” “In that case,” observed Hartmann, “we ought to be glad that we shall be getting fresh dishes.” “Your pleasure is our happiness,” the waiter replied. “Will you have brown bread or white?” “When you eat in the country,” Toni said, “you must have brown bread.” “And what wines do you care for, sir?” the waiter asked. “Wine,” exclaimed Hartmann happily, as if rejoiced to discover that such a thing still existed for people’s delectation. He studied the wine list and placed his order.

“We’re in luck,” he said to Toni. “This is far better than we expected.” Toni smoothed the crease on her upper lip with her tongue, either because she was hungry or maybe because she could think of nothing to say in reply. The waiter returned with their order. Michael and Toni drew up their chairs and began eating. Toni was ashamed to eat too heartily, but her bashfulness failed to blunt her appetite.

The potatoes, spinach, eggs, meat, turnips, and other things that the waiter brought them were all excellently prepared. Toni ate with relish. The stars winked at them from the sauce, and from the bough of a tree came the song of a bird. Hartmann covered his knees with his napkin and listened to the bird.

The girl they had seen on their arrival passed by. She gave them a glance of recognition. Hartmann looked at her and said, “Didn’t I say she was a red-head with freckles?” though in fact he did not manage to see whether she had freckles or not.

Toni lifted the glass with the flowers, looked at them and then smelled them. She had always been particularly fond of asters, they were so modest and lovely. She had planted some on her mother’s grave, and those asters, not particular about growing in the best soil necessarily, would look at her gratefully when she came for a visit.

Again the girl passed by, this time carrying a basket of plums with both hands. The juice of the overripe plums gave off an odor of cloying sweetness.

5

Taking his wineglass in his hand, Hartmann mused: Since the day I married her I never behaved so decently toward her as when I gave her the divorce. Unconsciously raising his glass higher, he continued: If a man quarrels with a woman, he has no right to live with her. Marriage without love is no marriage at all. Divorce is preferable to a quarrelsome marriage. He put down the glass, moved the cruet-stand, and selected a toothpick. Following the same trend of thought, he reflected: If a man marries a woman and does not love her, he has to give her a divorce. If he doesn’t divorce her, he has to love her. And that love has to undergo constant renewal. “Did you say anything?” Toni stretched out her hand, pointed to the tree, and said: “A bird.”

Hartmann looked at the tree.

“Is that the one that was singing,” Toni asked, “or was it another one?”

“Of course it was,” Hartmann replied with great animation, although his certainty rested upon insecure ground.

Toni leaned her head on her left shoulder and thought to herself, That little creature sits hidden in a tree, and its voice brings a thrill to one’s heart.

Hartmann clenched his fingers and looked at Toni as she sat with her head resting on her shoulder. Her shoulders seemed to him to be hidden, and two white specks peeped at him through the openings in her dress where her blouse had slipped down, exposing one shoulder. Now, Hartmann thought, we shall see the other one. Unconsciously he rapped on the table. The waiter heard and came up to them. Once he had come, Hartmann took out his purse, paid the bill and tipped him. The waiter thanked him and bowed profusely: either he was drunk, or else the tip was larger than he had anticipated.

The meal had been a good one, and it had cost Hartmann less than he had expected. He sat with a feeling of contentment and ordered a quarter-bottle of brandy for himself and a sweet liqueur for Toni. He took out a cigar and trimmed it with his knife. Then he offered his cigarette case to Toni. They sat opposite one another, the smoke from the cigar and cigarette mingling. Above them shone the little lanterns, and above the lanterns shone the stars. Toni parted the smoke with her fingers and went on smoking tranquilly. Hartmann looked at her and said: “Listen, Toni.” Toni raised her eyes to him. Hartmann put down his cigar and said: “I had a dream.”

“A dream?” Toni closed her eyes as if dreaming herself.

“Are you listening?” Hartmann asked. She opened her eyes, looked at him, and closed them again.

“I don’t remember whether I had this dream last night or the night before,” he went on. “But I remember every detail of it, as if I were dreaming it now. Are you listening, Toni?” She nodded her head.

“In this dream I was living in Berlin. Suessenschein came to visit me. You remember Suessenschein? At the time he had just returned from Africa. I’m always glad to see him, for he brings with him an atmosphere of the far-off places I used to dream of in my childhood. But that day I wasn’t glad. Perhaps it was because he came in the morning, when I like to sit by myself. Perhaps it was because in dreams we aren’t always happy to be with the people we enjoy when we’re awake. He had someone else with him, a young man to whom I took a violent dislike the instant he walked in. He acted as if he had wearied himself with Suessenschein on all his travels. But for Suessenschein’s sake I treated him civilly. Are you listening?” “I’m listening,” Toni whispered, as if afraid that the sound of her voice would interrupt his story. Hartmann continued:

“Suessenschein looked around at my flat and said: If I found a flat like yours, I’d take it; I want to stay here awhile, and I’m tired of hotels. I replied: I’ve heard of a very nice flat that’s going in Charlottenburg. To which he rejoined: All right, let’s go there. Wait, I suggested, let me phone up first. No, he said, we’ll go there straight away. I went along with him.”

Toni nodded, and Hartmann went on:

“When we got there, the landlady was nowhere to be seen. I wanted to tell him off for being so impulsive, but I stopped myself, as my temper was very frayed, and I felt I was in danger of going too far. His companion urged the maid to go and call the landlady. The maid looked at him suspiciously, or maybe she just looked at him without any particular expression, but I hated him so much that I thought she looked at him with suspicion. As she went, the landlady carne in. She was dark, neither young nor old, on the short side, eyes a trifle filmy, and one leg shorter than the other, though this did not seem like a blemish in her. On the contrary, she seemed to dance along rather than walk. A secret joy twinkled on her lips, a hidden, yearning joy, a virginal joy.”

Although Hartmann was aware that Toni was listening with interest, he nevertheless asked, “Are you listening, Toni?” and went on.

“The rooms she showed us were very nice. But Suessenschein turned away from them and said: I wouldn’t advise you to take this flat. Winter is approaching, and there is no stove. I gazed at him in astonishment: Who was it that wanted to rent a flat, I or he? I have a fine one of my own; I’m very pleased with it, and I have no intention of exchanging it for another. Suessenschein repeated: A place without a stove, a place without a stove, if I were you I wouldn’t take it. Here the landlady put in: But there is a stove. But Suessenschein interrupted her: Where is the stove? In the bedroom. But the study, madam, is all of glass. Are you looking for somewhere to live, or for an observatory from which to view the frozen birds? His words depressed me so much that I began to feel cold. I looked around and saw that the study did indeed consist more of windows than walls. I nodded and said: That’s so. The landlady looked at me with her filmy but charming eyes, and straightened herself with a caper. I turned away from her and thought, How shall I ever get away from this cold? My skin was already clinging to my bones. I woke up and found that the blanket had slipped off my bed.”

After Hartmann had finished, he had a feeling that perhaps he ought not to have recounted his dream; and yet at the same time he experienced a sense of relief. In order, therefore, to give expression to both emotions, he assumed a tone of banter and said: “That was a fine story I told you. The whole thing really wasn’t worth telling.” Toni licked her lips, and her eyes grew moist. He looked at her involuntarily, and it seemed to him that it was with just such eyes that the landlady had looked at him. Now there was nothing wrong with her, except…except for something whose meaning he did not understand, but he felt that if Toni were to get up, she, too, would turn out to be lame. However, since that would not seem like a blemish — as he knew from the woman in the dream it followed that even if Toni were lame, she would not seem crippled to him. He got up, took his hat, and said: “Let’s go.”

6

Toni stood up, removed her flowers from the glass, shook the moisture off them, and wrapped them in paper. She inhaled their scent and paused a moment or two in the hope that Michael might sit down again: she was afraid lest on the way back something should happen to disturb their atmosphere of calm. The waiter came up, handed Toni her parasol, bowed them out, and followed them until they were out of the garden. When they had gone, he extinguished the lanterns. The garden and its surroundings became dark. A frog jumped in the grass. Toni dropped her flowers in alarm.

The croaking of frogs rose from the banks of the stream. The electric wires were giving off sparks: something had obviously gone wrong with them. After a few paces the wires and poles disappeared from view, and other sparks could be seen: they were the fireflies, which dappled the darkness with their glitter.

Hartmann stood wondering. What has happened here? he asked himself. His mind was tranquil, as if his question had furnished the answer.

Gradually they reached the stream. It lay there in its bed, its waters gently rocking. The stars cast their reflection upon its formless ripples, and the moon floated on the surface. The cry of a bird of prey was heard in the distance, and its echo pierced the air.

Toni crossed her feet and leaned on her parasol. She lowered her eyelids and drowsed. The waves raised themselves up and fell back exhausted. The frogs croaked, and the river plants exuded a tepid smell.

Toni was tired, and her eyes dropped. The river willows whispered, and the waters of the stream undulated languidly. Toni was no longer able to control her eyes, and they began to close of their own accord. But Michael was awake.

Never in his life had he been so wide awake. The tiniest movement set his mind working, and he looked about him searchingly, lest anything of what was happening should escape him. It was good, he felt, that Toni existed for him in this world and at that hour. But what was good for him was not good for her. She was exhausted, and her legs were incapable of supporting her body.

“Tired?” he asked her. “I’m not tired,” she replied; but her voice belied her words.

Michael laughed, and Toni looked at him in surprise. He laughed again and said: “One day I was out walking with the girls. I asked them if they were tired, and Renate answered: ‘I’m not tired, but my legs are.’”

“The sweet chick,” said Toni with a sigh.

Hartmann was sorry he had mentioned the girls. He looked around to see if he could find a conveyance to take them back to town. But the earth was silent: no sound of a carriage wheel or motor. He looked in all four directions, to see if he could discover a telephone booth. He was filled with pity for this small woman who had not the strength to walk. Once or twice he supported her with his arm. Her dress was damp from the moist air, and she shivered a little. If he did not get her under a roof, she would certainly catch cold.

But the city was far away, and the air was dank. He wanted to take off his jacket and wrap it around Toni. But he was afraid she might refuse; and he did not want to do anything that would evoke her refusal.

Perhaps, Michael thought, there would be a bed for her at the inn where they had eaten. Taking her arm, he said: “Let’s go back to the inn.” Toni dragged after him, bereft of strength.

7

They took the same road by which they had come and found their way back to the garden. Hartmann shoved the gate open, and they went up the stone steps. The house was silent. The waiter was not to be seen, neither was the girl. Obviously the household was asleep, and no guests were expected. Every step they took cried out at the intrusion.

Hartmann opened the door to the house and stepped inside. He spoke a greeting into the room, but there was no reply. He found an old man sitting bent over a table, pipe in mouth, an expression of annoyance on his face.

“Is there any room to sleep here?” Hartmann asked. The old man looked at him and at the woman by his side. It was clear from the old man’s expression that he was not pleased to see a couple who had turned up after midnight to seek a haven of love. He took his pipe from his mouth, laid it on the table, and, giving them a look of annoyance, said severely: “We have one room vacant.” Toni blushed. Hartmann crumpled his hat and said nothing. The landlord took his pipe, turned it upside down, knocked it against the table, and removed the ash. Putting aside the ash and the burnt shreds, he gathered the remnants of tobacco and put them back in the pipe. Pressing them down with his thumb, he said: “We’ll prepare the room for the lady.” Finally, raising his eyes, he said: “We’ll find a place for the gentleman as well. When we’re full we usually make up a bed on the billiard table.”

Toni inclined her head toward the landlord and said: “Thank you very much indeed.” Said Hartmann: “Would you show us the room?”

The landlord got up and lit a candle. Opening a door for them, he followed them into a spacious room in which there were three beds, one of them made up. There was a washstand with two basins and two jugs filled with water, and a large decanter half-full of water covered with an inverted tumbler. Above the made-up bed hung a broken horn with a bridal wreath on it, and a ram’s head and the head of a wild boar with eyes of red glass hung upon the walls. The innkeeper took the tumbler, examined it, stood it upside down, and waited for Hartmann to leave.

Hartmann put out his hand to test the mattress. Seeing him do so, the innkeeper said: “No one has yet complained of not getting a good nights sleep in this house.” Hartmann paled, and his hand remained dangling. The innkeeper placed the candle next to the made-up bed and said: “Now sir, if you’ll come with me, I’ll make your bed for you.” And he waited for his guest to accompany him.

Finally Hartmann grasped the innkeeper’s intention. Taking Toni’s hand, he wished her goodnight. Her hand clung to his, and her eyes enfolded his heart.

A few moments later the innkeeper was making up Hartmann’s bed on the billiard table and chatting to him as he did so. His annoyance gave way to affability. Now that the guest was without the woman, he considered him respectable. He asked his guest how many pillows he liked to sleep on, and whether he preferred a heavy blanket or a light one, and did he wish to take anything to drink before he retired for the night. Finally he gave him a lighted candle and a box of matches and left the room. A few moments later, Hartmann went out into the garden.

The lanterns had gone out, but a light from heaven illuminated the darkness. The grass and the mandrakes gave off a damp, refreshing scent. A chestnut dropped from a tree and burst. Another chestnut fell sharply and burst.

Hartmann stood reviewing the night’s events. After a brief pause he went across to the table at which he had dined with Toni. The chairs had been leaned against it, and the dew glistened on the bare tabletop. Underneath the table lay a thick cigar. It was the cigar that he had put down on the table when he began telling Toni his dream.

“Now we’ll have a smoke,” he said. But before he could take out a cigar he had forgotten what it was he had meant to do.

8

“What was I going to do?” he asked himself. “To get up on this little mound in front of me.” He had not really intended to do so, but once he had told himself, he went and did it.

The mound was dome-shaped, wide at the base and narrow at the top and not far across, and it was surrounded by bushes. He drew in his breath and considered: I expect each thorn and thistle has a different name. How many names of thorns do I know? More than I thought. I wonder if the gardener doesn’t lavish more care on the thorns than on the flowers. Those gardeners destroy the thorns where they normally grow and plant them in the wrong places. Perhaps the names I know are the names of the thorns growing here…Suddenly he smiled: That innkeeper doesn’t know what Toni and I are to one another. How annoyed he was when we asked for somewhere to sleep. Now let me see what’s here.

He looked down on the mound and recalled an incident of his childhood. He had gone for a walk with some friends, and, seeing a mound, he had climbed it, then slipped and slid down to the bottom. He imagined himself back in the same situation, and began to be afraid he would fall; no, it was rather a wonder he had not already slipped to the bottom. And if he had not already slipped and fallen, he was bound to do so; although there was no real danger of his falling, his fear itself would make him fall; though he was still on his feet, his legs were beginning to give way and to slip, he would roll down, his bones would get broken.

He took heart and climbed down. When he reached the bottom he was amazed. How high was the mound, a foot or eighteen inches? Yet how it had frightened him! He closed his eyes and said, “I’m tired,” and returned to the inn.

An air of calm pervaded the entire house. The innkeeper sat by himself in a little room, rubbing his ankles together and drinking a beverage to help him sleep. Hartmann slipped in quietly, undressed, stretched out on the billiard table, covered himself, and looked at the wall.

Strange, he thought, all the while I stood on the mound, I was thinking only about myself, as if I were alone in the world, as if I did not have two daughters; as if I did not have — a wife.

Hartmann loved his daughters the way a father does. But, like any other father, he did not forego his own interests for the sake of his children. The incident of the mound had opened his heart. He was both ashamed and surprised. And he proceeded once more to occupy his thoughts with himself.

What had happened to him on the mound? Actually, nothing. He had got onto the top of the mound and imagined he was slipping down. And what if he had fallen? He would have lain on the ground and picked himself up again. He stretched out on the bed and thought, smiling: How ridiculous Tenzer looked when I took Toni away from that albino! There are still things left in the world to make one laugh. But let me get back: What happened on the mound? Not the one I was standing on just now, but the one I fell from. One day I went for a walk with my friends. I climbed onto the top of the mound, and suddenly I found myself lying in the ditch. He did not remember himself actually falling, only that he was lying in the ditch. Something sweet was trickling into his mouth, his lips were cut, his tongue swollen, and his entire body bruised. But his limbs felt relaxed, like those of a man who stretches himself after throwing off a heavy burden. He had often fallen since then, but he had never experienced such a feeling of tranquility in any other fall. It seems that one does not have to taste such an experience more than once in a lifetime.

9

He extinguished the candle, closed his eyes, and sought to recollect the event. The details of it were confused, as in a dream. From the walls of the house a cricket sounded, then stopped, and the silence became twice as intense. His limbs relaxed, and his mind grew tranquil. Once more the cricket chirped. What I want to know, said Hartmann to himself, is how long he’s going to go on chirping. As he framed the question, he began thinking of Toni. He could see her face, and her movements, and also the two white spots where her skin showed through the brown dress…There’s no doubt about it, she isn’t young. Even if her hair hasn’t turned gray, she has many more wrinkles, The worst of them all is that crease in her upper lip. Has she a tooth missing?

He still thought of Toni critically, as he always had, but now he felt that all those shortcomings in no way detracted from her. With a sweet feeling of adoration he summoned up her face, that wonderful face; but then it began to fade away from him, against his will. How thin her shoulders were, but her figure was that of a pretty girl. Hartmann embraced the air with his arm and felt himself blushing. As he was talking to himself he heard a sort of moan. Since he was thinking about his wife, it seemed to him that the sound came from her room. He opened his eyes and, lifting his head, listened intently. Help me, O Lord, help me. Has anything happened? In reality he could have heard nothing, for there was a thick wall between them. Nor was it a moan of distress he had heard. Nevertheless, he sat upright on his bed in case he should hear anything, in case anything of her vital being should reach his ears. Perhaps he might be able to help her.

Once again she appeared before him the way she had looked that day — lifting her veil onto her forehead, raising the asters to her face, digging her parasol into the ground, parting the cigarette smoke with her fingers. Gradually the parasol vanished, the smoke dispersed, and the asters grew more numerous, until they covered the whole mound. Astonished and puzzled, he gazed in front of him. As he did so his eyes closed, his head dropped on the pillow, his soul fell asleep, and his spirit began to hover in the world of dreams, where no partition separated them.

The Face and the Image

Naomi had washed the floor, arranged the furniture, watered the flowers, and wiped the inkwells; and the room was filled with peace. I waited for Naomi to finish all her work, and then I would sit down to do mine. For it was a great work I wanted to do, to write down in a book my thoughts about polished mirrors. This device, which shows you whatever you show it, aroused my wonder even in childhood, perhaps more than the thing itself. And now that I have grown old, and seen the deeds that pass, and some of the deeds that last, I have continued to ponder on the qualities of mirrors. They are flat, and thin, and smooth as ice, and there is nothing inside them. But they store up whatever you put before them, and before them there is no cheating, or partiality, or injustice, or deceit. Whatever you show them, they show you. They do not expunge or amplify, add on or take away — like the truth, which neither adds nor takes away. Therefore I said: I will tell of their virtues and their perfect rectitude.

“Finished,” said Naomi, and a smile of satisfaction seemed to play on her chaste lips. Naomi was really entitled to be satisfied with her work, and I should have been satisfied too, but for a sudden sadness that enfolded my heart.

But I took no notice of this sadness, though it was heavier today than it had been yesterday, for that is how it goes: anything that lives continues to grow. So I took a chair to sit down and begin my work. A paper fell off the chair, and I saw it was a telegram. I looked at Naomi. “When they brought the telegram I was busy wiping the table,” she said, “and I left it on the chair so it wouldn’t get soiled.”

For tidiness’ sake I took the telegram and laid it on the table. Then I took a knife to open it. At that moment there appeared before me the image of my grandfather, my mother’s father, in the year he died, lying in his bed and reading his will all night. His beard was bluish silver and the hair of his beard was not wavy but straight, every single hair hanging by itself and not mingling with the next, but their perfect rectitude uniting them all. I began to calculate how old my grandfather had been when I was born, and how old my mother had been when she bore me and it turned out that her age today was the same as my grandfather’s age at that time, and my age was the same as hers when I was born.

Many other thoughts passed through my mind, but I set them aside and went back to the telegram. I opened the telegram and read: “Mother sick, awaiting you.” Mother sick, waiting for me. Taking the plain sense of the words, they meant: Mother is on the point of death; or perhaps she was already dead and they were waiting for me before burying her.

I quickly took my traveling kit and put it in my valise; I gazed at the room, and at the table where a few moments before I had longed to do my work. I stood there all alone with myself, like a man who is shown a clenched hand and thinks that what he wants is inside, but when the hand is opened it turns out to be empty.

“Naomi,’’ I said to her, “I am going away, and I do not know how long I shall stay. Close up the house behind me, lock it up thoroughly, and take the key with you until I come back.”

Naomi nodded her head with its two plaits and looked at me. I saw from the look in her eyes that she disapproved of a man going to see his mother in the patched trousers in which he was in the habit of doing his work; it was not respectful to his family to come to them like that. What would people say? How many years he has spent in the world, and he has not managed to buy a whole garment!

I closed my eyes to Naomi’s apprehensions. When Mother might be on the point of death, could I worry about my dress? By the time I took off my old clothes and put on new, Mother might have breathed her last. I waved my hand deprecatingly and said, “No, I am going as I am. In any case, I shall take another pair of trousers with me.” But the valise was small and did not hold much. And my other valise was in the attic, and to get up there I needed a ladder, and if I found a ladder and climbed up, the valise might well be locked, and if it was locked, I might not find the key. So, since there were more doubts than certainties, I took my little valise in my hand and went out, dressed as I was in my patched trousers.

Thinking about the way ahead, I said to myself: I am going to my mother and I do not know whether she is alive or dead, for when I last left her she was sick, and she cried and said, “My heart tells me that I shall never see you again.” And it is known that the sick see with a third eye, which the Angel of Death lends them.

I took a short cut through a certain old courtyard, like the one where I used to play hide-and-seek in my childhood. The same sensation I felt in my head during this game came back to me. Picture to yourselves a large, old courtyard, full of many corners, and every corner full of corners, besides various articles and bits and pieces deposited by their owners in case they might need them, the owners are dead, the articles are rusty, and the rust glows with a kind of damp light which terrifies but does not illuminate, And as I am a little child with my little friends, I hide from them and they hide from me. We stand and wait, and none of us knows whether he wants to be found or not. Finally, none of us looks for the others. We run about looking for a secret corner more secluded than the first, and my head goes around and around, and the rust that glimmers from the junk makes my flesh creep.

They were taking a body out of the yard, and a man I knew was carrying the bier, exerting all his strength and pushing his feet into the ground until they were getting flattened with the weight. The very nails of his hands and toes cried: Come and carry with me. His eyes were weary; he seemed to be carrying them on his shoulders, from which they were looking out in entreaty, I began to worry in case he told me with his mouth what his eyes were entreating, when I was hurrying to Mother. I slipped through into a cranny, and from there to another, from there to the street and then to the railroad station, and from the station into a carriage.

Thank Heaven I had reached the train and got my ticket, and no longer had to push and be pushed, but could sit and leave my time at the disposal of the train, which knew when to depart and when to arrive. And since I was always engrossed in my work and had no time to look at myself, I thought: Now that I have set aside all my affairs, let me think about myself a little. It is good for a man to think about himself a little and not think what he is always thinking. I looked at myself and saw myself standing in the station on the carriage step. The station was full of people and luggage, some carrying their belongings in their hands and some pulling at the porters to carry their luggage. The guard was waving his flag and all of them were slipping from their places, some this way and some that, returning as they ran to the place they had come from.

Suddenly, I felt eyes staring at this man who is already taking his place in the train. I began to be afraid they might give me the evil eye. I turned my head toward the wall and found a notice there, stating that every traveler to this place needed a travel permit. I realized that this place where I was going was in a military area, and I had left my travel permit at home. This place where I was born, and where my mother was dying, was in a military area, and I had to go there, and I did not have my travel permit with me.

What was to be done? There was nothing to be done but to go back home, get my travel permit, and set off on tomorrow’s train, for the guard was already blowing his whistle and the train was on the point of departure. I hastily jumped out of the carriage. Those who had come to see travelers off looked at me, startled, and those who had come to travel and had not arrived in time began to run in haste and confusion, as if I had left a place vacant for them. I held up my hands, as if begging their pardon, and felt that my hands were empty, for my valise was still in the compartment.

I fixed my eyes on the train, which had set out on a long journey and taken my valise with it. The train chugged on, emitting a heavy trail of smoke. My eyes were smothered in the smoke and covered with the smoke, and out of the smoke slipped the man who had been carrying the bier. Strange to say, he was no longer carrying his eyes on his shoulders, but his eyes were in his head, and his hands were empty, and on his lips there was a kind of smile. “Where are you going?” he said to me. “Home,” I said to him. He passed his hand over his beard, blew a hair at me, and said, “Home?” And again he was looking at me from between his shoulders. How people can change! A short time before, he had been looking at me face to face, and a short time later he was looking at me from the back of his neck.

I took no short cuts on my way back, for you did not know what was hidden in that courtyard and what lay in store for you there. When I reached my house, I found it locked; the key was still in my valise, and my valise was still in the railway carriage. There was one more key, and Naomi had it. And You, O God, made me send Naomi on leave until my return.

I went to Naomi’s house but did not find her. Where was Naomi? Naomi had gone to visit her uncle. Which uncle?

Some of the neighbors said her uncle on her father’s side, and some said her uncle on her mother’s side. If she had gone to her father’s brother, he lived in Shaarayim; if to her mother’s brother, he lived in Sdeh Shalom. If I went one way, it would take half a day; if I went the other way, it would take half a day; if I did not find her and had to go after her again, that would be a day gone, and I would be late for tomorrow’s train. And after all, I could not tear myself in two — sending one part this way and one the other. Whether I liked it or not, I must go one way or the other. And my heart was pulling away from me, wanting to go to Mother; and it was right, for all the trouble I had taken had only been for Mother’s sake, and if I did not hurry and set off at once, I might never find my mother and reach her before her burial.

Suddenly an idea came into my mind: perhaps Naomi had not gone away, and if she had not gone away she was still in the city, and if she was in the city, she might have gone to one of her relatives. I must go there and find her. It is a happy man who finds a new idea when all his ideas are exhausted. I began to inquire which of her relatives here Naomi was in the habit of visiting, and they told me: She has one relative here, a carpenter; perhaps she has gone to him.

I went to the carpenter and found him on his knees fitting a mirror into the door of a wardrobe. I greeted him and he returned my greeting from between his knees, without raising his head an inch for my sake. Almost certainly he had looked in the mirror and seen that my trousers were old, and he had understood in his own way that a man like this was not worth troubling his head over. “Is Naomi here?” I asked him; but he did not reply. “Where is Naomi?” I asked again. He looked at me over his shoulder and replied angrily, “What do you want of Naomi?” “Naomi works for me,” I said, “and I need her.”

When he heard I was Naomi’s master, he stood up and started to treat me with deference. He snatched a chair and then another, set them before me and asked me to sit down, and began to say how fond of me Naomi’s family were. And, since he was a relative of Naomi’s and now had the privilege of seeing me in his home, I must eat something to bring a blessing on his house. So he called his wife and told her to bring refreshments. His wife came and brought some sweetmeats. She spread her hands in front of her eyes and kissed the tips of her fingers, as simple women do when the scroll of the law is taken out of the Ark. So sacred was the virtue of hospitality in her eyes. She started persuading me to eat and drink, while her husband begged me to drink and eat, she on one side and he on the other.

My lips were sealed and my hands were numb; they would not obey me and take some food or drink. I overcame them and replied in speech and gesture: “Impossible, I am in a hurry. I cannot stay here. I have to rush away.” But Naomi’s relatives turned a deaf ear, repeating their invitation over and over again. So I took something of what they offered me.

So there I sat against my will, eating and drinking whatever Naomi’s relatives gave me. At first I ate and drank against my will, without enjoyment, and then willingly, for hunger had begun to torment me. My house was locked, the key in the valise, the valise in the railway carriage, and the carriage on the way to its destination, and all my thoughts were with my mother; perhaps while I was filling my gullet they were sealing her grave. I turned my head aside so as not to look at what I saw. My image rose before me from the mirror in the wardrobe, which the carpenter had been fixing an hour before. The mirror stared at me face to face, reflecting back every movement of the hand and quiver of the lips, like all polished mirrors, which show you whatever you show them, without partiality or deceit. And it, namely, the revelation of the thing, surprised me more than the thing itself, perhaps more than it had surprised me in my childhood, perhaps more than it had ever surprised me before.

The Orchestra

1

I had been busy that entire year. Every day, from morning until midnight, I would sit at my table and write — at times out of habit, and at times stimulated by the pen. We sometimes dare to call this divine inspiration. I therefore became oblivious to all other affairs; and I would recall them only to postpone them. But on the eve of Rosh ha-Shanah I said to myself: A new year is approaching, and I have left many letters unattended. Let me sit down and reply to them, and enter the new year without obligations.

I proceeded on that day as on every other, save that I am regularly accustomed to arise at dawn, and that day I arose three hours earlier. For this is a night when one arises especially early for penitential prayers on the theme of “Remember the Covenant.”

Before I sat down to take care of the letters, I reflected: A new year is approaching, and one ought to enter it clean, but if time does not permit me to go and bathe in the river, because of these letters, I will take a hot bath.

At that moment Charni happened to be visiting us. The same old Charni who usually boasts to me that she served in my grandfather’s house long before I was born. Charni said: “Your wife is busy with holiday preparations, and you are placing extra burdens upon her. Come to our house and I will prepare you a hot bath.” I liked her suggestion; after all, I needed a haircut in honor of the Rosh ha-Shanah festival, and on the way to the barber I would stop off and bathe.

I examined the letters and weighed which of them ought to be answered first. Since they were many and the time was short, it was impossible to answer in one day all that many men had written to me in the course of an entire year, and I decided to pick out the most important ones, then to deal with those of middling importance, and afterwards with the least important. While I stood deliberating, it occurred to me that I should get rid of the trivial letters first, in order to be free for the more important ones.

Trivia tend to be frustrating. Because a matter is trivial and has no substance, it is difficult to handle. If there is a trace of substance, it lies in what the author of the letter had in mind and what answer he expected. As much as I knew that I had nothing to say in reply, my desire to answer increased, for if I left them unattended, they would trouble me. Their very existence is a burden, for I remember them and come to trivial thoughts.

I picked up a pen to write, but my mind was blank. How strange! The entire year I write effortlessly, and now that I have to write two or three inconsequential lines, my pen refuses to cooperate. I put that letter down and picked up another.

This letter was no letter, but a ticket to a concert conducted by the king of musicians. I have heard that the minds of those who hear him are transformed. There actually was a man who used to go to all the concerts but got nothing out of them; he used to think that he did not appreciate music until he chanced upon a concert of this conductor. He said afterward: “Now I know that I do understand music, but that all musicians whom I have heard until now do not know what music is.” I took the concert ticket and put it in my pocket.

2

The days before a holiday are brief — some of them because sundown is early and others because holiday preparations are heavy. All the more so the day before Rosh ha-Shanah, which is short in itself and is sped by preparations for the Day of Judgment. By noon I hadn’t managed to answer so much as a single letter. I put the letters aside and said to myself that what I had not managed to do before Rosh ha-Shanah I would do in the days between Rosh ha-Shanah and the Day of Atonement. It would have been good to enter a new year free of obligations, but what was I to do when trivial letters did not instruct me how they were to be answered.

I got up and went to my grandfather’s house to bathe before the holiday, for Charni had prepared me there a hot bath. But when I got to the house, I found the door locked. I walked around and around the house, and each time I reached the door, I stopped and knocked. A neighbor peeked out from behind her curtains and said: “Are you looking for Charni? Charni went to the market to buy fruit for the holiday benediction.” I continued walking around the house until Charni arrived.

By rights the old lady should have apologized for making me wait and robbing me of my time. But not only didn’t she excuse herself, she stood and chattered. If I remember correctly, she told about finding a pomegranate which was partly squashed, yet its seeds had not separated.

Suddenly three sounds were heard from the tower of the Council house. I looked at my watch and saw that it was already three o’clock. My watch is always in dispute with the tower of the Council house, and today it made peace with it. And it seemed that the Heavens were agreeing with them. Had I tarried so long on the way, and been detained walking around the house? In any case, three hours had passed and scarcely two and a half remained before the New Year’s festival began. And this old woman was standing and chattering about a pomegranate that was squashed and about its seeds that had not separated.

I interrupted her and asked: “Have you prepared the bath for me, and is the water heated?” Charni set down her basket and exclaimed: “God in Heaven, I had intended to prepare a bath for you!” I said: “And you haven’t done it?” She replied: “Not yet, but I will do it right away.” I urged: “Hurry, Charni, hurry. The day doesn’t stand still.” She picked between her teeth with her finger and said: “You don’t have to rush me. I know that time doesn’t stand still, and neither will I. Look, I am already on my way in to make the fire and warm up some water. You practically have your hot bath.” I took a walk in front of the house while waiting for the water to heat.

The old judge passed by me. I remembered a question that I had meant to ask him, but I was afraid to get involved with him and so not manage to cleanse myself for the holiday; for this judge, once you turn to him, will not let you go. I postponed my question for another time, and did not turn to him. In order to occupy myself, I took out the ticket and noticed that the concert was for the eve of Rosh ha-Shanah. Isn’t it strange that I who am not a concert-goer, should be invited to a concert on the eve of Rosh ha-Shanah!

I put the ticket back in my pocket, and resumed pacing in front of the house.

Ora, my little relative, came by, whose voice was as sweet as the sound of the violin, and who looked like a violin which the musician had leaned against an unstable wall, and the wall collapsed upon it. I looked closely at her and saw that she was depressed. I asked her: “What have you been doing, Ora? You look like a little fawn that went to the fountain and found no water.” Ora said: “I’m leaving here.” I asked: “Why are you leaving? What’s your reason? You have always wanted to see this magnificent conductor, and now that he has come to conduct our orchestra, you are leaving.” Ora burst into tears and said: “Uncle, I don’t have a ticket.” I laughed good-heartedly and said to her: “Let me wipe away your tears.” I looked at her affectionately, and thought how lucky I was to be able to gratify this dear child, who found music more delightful than all the delights in the world, and was most enthralled with the famous conductor who was this evening conducting the great chorus. I put my hand in my pocket to take out the ticket and give it to Ora. And again I smiled good-heartedly, like one who has the power to do good. But Ora, who did not know my generous intentions, threw herself about my neck and kissed me goodbye. I became distracted, forgot what I was about, and didn’t give Ora the ticket. And while I was standing there, bewildered, Charni came and called me.

The oven was flaming, the bath clean and clear, and the bath water leaped and rose to meet me. But I hadn’t the strength to bathe. Even my time was not with me. I said to my brother: You bathe, for I am a weak person, and if I bathe in hot water, I have to rest afterwards, and there isn’t enough time. I left the bath and went home. In order to be more comfortable, I removed my hat from my head and carried it in my hand. A passing wind mussed my hair. Where were my brains? For in the hour that I stood and waited for the bath, I could have gone to the barber’s. I lifted my eyes and looked up at the sky. The sun was already about to set. I went home with a heavy heart. My daughter came out to meet me, dressed in her holiday best. She pointed her finger into space and said: “Light.” I thought to myself: What is she saying? The sun has already set, and hasn’t left a trace of light behind. Or perhaps she meant the candle that was kindled in honor of the festival. I looked at the candles and realized that the festival had already begun, and I had better run to the House of Prayer. My daughter stared at my old clothes and put her little hands on her new dress to cover it, so as not to shame her father in his old garments. And her eyes were on the verge of tears, both for herself who wore a new dress when her father was dressed in old clothes, and for her father who wore old clothes at a time when the New Year had arrived.

3

After dinner I went outside. The heavens were black, but many stars glittered in them and lit up their darkness. Not a man was outdoors, and all the houses were sunk in sleep. And I too started to doze off. But this sleep was not really sleep, for I could feel that my feet were walking. And I kept walking and walking like this until I arrived at a certain place and heard the sound of music, and I knew I had reached the concert hall. I took out my ticket and entered.

The hall was full. Men and women violinists, men and women drummers, trumpeters, and players of a variety of instruments all stood, dressed in black, and played incessantly. The great conductor was not to be seen in the hall, but the musicians played as if someone were standing over them and waving his baton. And all the men and women musicians were my friends and acquaintances, whom I knew from all the places I had ever lived. How did it happen that all my acquaintances came together in one place and in one chorus?

I came upon a place, sat down, and concentrated. Each man and woman was playing for himself. However, all the melodies joined to form a single song. And every man and woman was bound to his instrument, and the instruments were fastened to the floor, and each one thought that he alone was bound, and was ashamed to ask his neighbor to release him. Or perhaps the players knew that they were fastened to their instruments, and their instruments fastened to the floor, but thought that it was by their free choice that they and their instruments were so bound, and it was by their free choice that they played. One thing was clear, that though their eyes were on their instruments, their eyes did not see what their hands were doing, for all alike were blind. And I fear that perhaps even their ears did not hear what they were playing, and that from much playing they had grown deaf.

I slid out of my seat and crept toward the door. The door was open, and a man whom I had not noticed upon entering was standing at the entrance. He was like all other doorkeepers; but there was about him something like the air of that same old judge, who, once you have turned to him, does not let you go.

I said to him: “I would like to leave.” He plucked the word out of my mouth and replied in my voice: “To leave? What for?” I said to him: “I have prepared myself a bath, and am in a hurry lest it grow cold.” He replied in a voice that would have terrified even a man stronger than I, and said to me: “It’s flaming. It’s flaming. Your brother has already been scalded by it.” I replied, apologetically: “I was occupied with correspondence, and didn’t have time to take my bath.” He asked: “With what letters were you occupied?” I took out a letter and showed him. He bent over me and said: “But I wrote that letter.” I replied: “I intended to answer you.” He looked at me and asked: “What did you intend to answer?” My words hid because of his voice, and my eyes closed, and I began to grope with my hands. Suddenly I found myself standing before my house.

My daughter came out and said: “Let me bring you a candle.” I answered her: “Do you really think the candle will light my darkness?” By the time she had gone to bring it, the fire escaped from the furnace and blazed around about. And some woman stood before the furnace heaping wood on the fire. Because of the fire and the smoke, I could not look on. And I didn’t see if it was old Charni who stood before the furnace, or if it was my young relative Ora who heaped up the fire.

A terror descended upon me, and I stood as if fixed to the earth. My spirit grew despondent within me that, at the time when all who sleep were sleeping, I should be so awake. In truth, not I alone was awake, but also the stars in heaven were awake with me. And by the light of the stars of heaven I saw what I saw. And because my spirit was lowly, my words hid in my mouth.

The Letter

1

All that day I was busy writing a letter of condolence to the relatives of Mr. Gedaliah Klein. Mr. Gedaliah Klein had been one of the most prominent men in our city, well-born and wealthy like his fathers before him, liked by the authorities and respected by the community, blessed with a long life and a full one. He had married his daughters to the most learned men of his time; he had taken wealthy wives for his sons; and he had lived to see them producing shrewd and gifted sons and daughters, fit for anything the country needed. In short, he had achieved in this world every temporal success, and no doubt all good things awaited him in the world to come, through legacies he had left behind for works of charity and mercy.

When good men are successful in life, it is good for them and good for the world; moreover, they provide convincing testimony that virtue pays, for everyone can see that a man does not toil for nothing or waste his strength in vain. The whole world, therefore, mourns the passing of successful men. Relatives and friends, companies and charities, banks and business firms, managers and administrators, householders and craftsmen, speculators and agents, authors and teachers — all proclaimed their grief in public: in the press and on every wall. The newspapers also praised him at great length, and if they exaggerated, the exaggeration itself showed that the deceased was a great man, for if anyone is praised, he must be praiseworthy.

I too put aside my work to sympathize with his relatives and write them a few words of condolence, for I had been his friend and acquaintance for thirty years. It started when I arrived in the Land of Israel with nothing in my possession but love of the land and love of labor. I went to Mr. Klein to ask his advice, because I had heard that he was an amiable man and one could get advice and assistance from him; but since he had his hands full with the general good, he could not manage to deal with each individual, and he put me off time and again. Several years later, when I had married into a good family and become a family man, he took notice of me and showed me affection and friendship, as if we had been friends all the time. He honored me in the presence of my neighbors and visited me at home; and he used to rebuke me, saying: “I was the first you came to, as soon as you arrived in the country, and now you do not show me your face.” He remembered that I had waited at his door, but forgot that he had put me off. Because he was a great doer and was always doing good to people, he thought he had done good to me as well, like all the public benefactors, who feel as if they have worked for each and every man. I, too, felt as if I had benefited from him. Anyone who has asked another man for a favor, even if it is not granted, feels in his bones an attachment to him, as if he had received a benefit from him.

At the time when Mr. Klein was friendly to me, he had given up all his business and was busy only with his body, treating it with baths and medicines and taking a walk every day. But even during his walks he did not ignore the public needs, like a man of property who surveys his possessions to learn what they require. And during his walks he would call over anyone he met by the way, like those who are accustomed to company and do not like to walk alone. Often he would summon me and walk with me. It is not my way to boast, but I may be permitted to boast of this, because it shows Mr. Klein’s affection, for he took the trouble to tell me all that had been done in Jerusalem during the years of his life. Sometimes he repeated himself, like an old man who is fond of his memories, and sometimes he changed a little, according to the needs of the time and the place.

We used to stroll in the streets and neighborhoods of Jerusalem, Mr. Klein straight as a cedar and I swaying like a reed. As he walked, he would lift his stick and point to a house or a ruin, and tell me how much money had been sunk in the ruin, or how often the house had passed from hand to hand, from bank to bank, from speculator to speculator, from creditor to creditor, and it was still doubtful whether the creditor had acquired permanent possession, for one of the ten things said of Jerusalem is that no house can be held in absolute ownership there. So in every neighborhood he used to tell me how many lives had been spent there and how much Jewish money had gone down the drain. This is how it used to happen: When a Jew wanted a plot of land, the speculators would immediately raise the price. But Jews are stubborn by nature, and stubborn by heredity; they say that real estate can never be overvalued. So they go to the owner of the land and raise their bid. But the trouble is that the speculators are also Jews, stubborn by nature and heredity; so they raise their bids too, until a speck of dust costs a golden pound. Humble people have no option but to withdraw from the deal in disappointment, and but for him there would be no neighborhood here, not even a house. But this is a story within a story, and every story is longer than the earth — and any one of them would take a thousand and one nights to tell. And as he told me about the building of Jerusalem, so he would talk to me about the land and its worthies. Mr. Klein used to say that by the nature of things every great man was small to begin with, so small that he needed a godfather at his circumcision, and he had been privileged to be godfather to most of the leaders.

During the year in which Mr. Gedaliah Klein died, and half a year before as well, I had been separated from him somewhat by reason of distance, because he lived in town and I had gone out to live in a distant neighborhood, and when I came to town I did not happen to see him. Now that he had passed away I said to myself: I will write a letter of condolence to his relatives.

2

When I sat down to write I did not know whom to write to, for of all his household I knew only one daughter, and she had no great respect or regard for me, for she remembered the early days when I would shuffle my feet on the threshold of her father’s house and he would pay me no attention, though she did not know that in the meantime Mr. Klein had changed his attitude to me. So I girded up my intellectual loins, as the literary men say, wrote a few words of condolence, and put the letter aside till the next day to check it.

I felt depressed and sad. I always feel sad whenever I am distracted from my work. Some people can do many things at a time without worrying, but as soon as I interrupt my work my heart feels sad, like a bookcase empty of books, or a field riddled by ants. For a year and a half I had set aside every other occupation to study the works of our later sages. I gave up the pleasures of the time and cut down my sleep, but not all dreamers see in sleep the good dreams I saw in waking. Days gone by and communities uprooted would come and appear before me, as at the time when Israel clung to the fear of God and were deeply in love with the wisdom of the Torah. And sometimes I was privileged to see the great men of Israel, the princes of the Torah in that generation; to perceive, if not the depths of their words, at least the fragrance of their teaching. There were times and periods when we had patriarchs and elders, judges and kings, heroes and men of war, seers and prophets, men of the Great Synagogue and Hasmoneans, sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud, scholars and eminences, nobles and princes, rabbis and codifiers, hymnalists and poets, who exalted the glory of Israel and sanctified the Divine Name in the world. But I love our later sages. Like a child in the darkening Sabbath, who comforts himself with the thought that the Sabbath still delays its departure, so I would comfort myself with the words of our later sages, which showed that there was still a little left of the Torah. For love of the Torah I would sit and study until the second watch of the night, and if I went to bed I would rely on the Divine Mercy to raise me up in the morning so that I could go back to my studies. Until the affair of that letter, when I put aside my studies.

I took a book, to restore my equanimity with the study of the Torah. The book slipped and fell out of my hand. I picked it up and opened it, but forgot what I had opened it for. When I remembered and looked into it, the letters skipped about in confusion and did not combine to make any sense. And I, too, skipped from one subject to another until I returned to the subject of Mr. Klein. The image of Mr. Klein rose before me, as when he and I used to stroll in the streets and neighborhoods of Jerusalem. I said to myself: I will go out and stroll a little, and recover my peace of mind.

3

I had not managed to cross the road before Mr. Gedaliah Klein tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Where have you been and where are you going?” “I am having a stroll,” I replied. Mr. Klein stroked his handsome beard and said, “I only came out to stroll too. So let us stroll together.”

The sunny days had passed; and a cold wind was blowing. No rain had fallen as yet, but clustering clouds in the sky foreboded the approach of winter. Mr. Klein was dressed in a fine fur coat, with a collar of silver fox over his shoulders and around his neck, and a fine cane with a silver knob in his hand. The white hair of his head and his white beard gleamed like the silver knob in his hand, and his face gleamed out of the collar of his coat like polished copper.

I began to apologize for not having come to see him for several days. He held up his hand to my mouth, as a person does who wants to speak and bids his companion be silent. And immediately he started talking and talking. Even if a bird had come from Paradise to teach us its talk, he would not have stopped his. Many things Mr. Klein told me on that occasion, and more than he told he hinted. From all he said I understood that, had he not raised up Jerusalem out of the dust, nothing worth a row of buttons would have been done.

The sun stood on the tops of the hills and enveloped the rocks with clouds of gold. Mr. Gedaliah Klein’s beard glowed even more than that gold, and so did the silver knob in his hand.

So we strolled. He talked and I listened. The streets darkened, and the houses hid in their shadows. Old men and women ran by, as they do close to the time of the afternoon prayer. As they passed, they looked at Mr. Klein in wonderment and moved their lips. I looked after them in surprise, for they and their clothes were different from those of the other old people of Jerusalem.

After we had made the rounds of several places we came back to my house.

I began to be afraid that Mr. Klein might want to go up to my room — and the letter of condolence I had written to his daughter lay open on my table.

I began to shiver.

“Are you worried about anything?” he said. I was silent and did not answer. “I see you are shivering,” he said. I thought it would not be polite to tell him what I was worried about, so I said to him, “Yesterday my grandfather appeared to me in a dream.” “Is your grandfather dead?” said he. I nodded in assent. “Well?” he said. “I will go and kindle a light in the House of Study,” I replied. He put his hand to his forehead and said, “You have reminded me where I was going.” He stretched out his cane, made a kind of circle in the air, and whispered, “I am going to the House of Study too.”

I said to myself: What will he do when the Divine Name is uttered during the prayers and in answering Amen? Is he not afraid they might realize that he is dead, and he will be put to shame? As in the case of the dead cantor, who used to slur over the Name when he prayed, because the dead cannot utter the Heavenly Name. Once a sage happened to be there, who sensed that the cantor was dead — and it is said: “The dead shall not praise the Lord.” He examined him and found that the Sanctified Name was sewn into his wrist. So he took a scalpel, cut into his flesh, and took out the Name — and immediately the body collapsed, and they saw that the flesh was already decomposed.

Mr. Klein did not perceive what I was thinking, and walked on. This is the greatness of Mr. Klein: if he decides to act, he pays no attention to anyone.

I dragged my feet and stopped at every step; perhaps the Almighty would find him some other topic on the way and distract his mind from the House of Study. He saw that I was lingering, and said with a smile: “If you had not told me your grandfather was dead, I would have thought I was walking with him.” I wanted to answer, but did not know what to say. To tell him the truth was impossible, but nothing else came into my mind.

The streetlamps had been lit, and the lights peered out feebly from the latticed windows. I breathed deeply and said, “It is late for the afternoon prayer.” He breathed deeply too, and said, “I feel warm — no, but…” He wrapped himself up better and began to fumble with his cane like a blind man, saying, “Do me a favor, see if there is not a House of Study here. Yes, there is one here.”

The worshippers stood bowed with their faces toward the wall. Mr. Klein went up to the most prominent place, and I remained standing by the door. Wherever they go, people like Mr. Klein find their places at the top. One old man turned his head from the wall and fixed his eyes on me. Mr. Klein gripped his cane. The cane trembled, and so did his hand. He was old, and his hands quivered.

A dim light shone from the four or five candelabra, of copper, of tin, of iron, and of clay. A peace not of this world pervaded the room, The worshippers finished their prayer and took two steps backwards, but the cantor still delayed the recitation of the final kaddish until the last of them should finish.

I looked around to see whom he was waiting for, and saw an old man standing in the southeastern corner, wrapped in his prayer shawl, covered in a fur coat up to above his neck. I did not see his face because it was turned toward the wall, but I saw his weary shoulders, those shoulders which the Holy One, blessed be He, has chosen to bear the burden of His Torah. My heart began to throb and fill with sweetness. The Almighty has still left us men who fill the heart with sweetness when we see them.

The old man turned his face, and I saw he was one of the princes of the Torah whose books I had been studying. I rushed forward and stood beside him. I knew that this was not a courteous thing to do, but I could not control myself. And I still wonder where I took the strength to do it.

Mr. Klein tapped me on the shoulder, took me by the hand, and said, “Come.” I looked at that illustrious scholar and went with Mr. Klein.

Mr. Klein noticed the president of the House of Study. So he left me and went up to him.

That illustrious scholar left the House of Study. As was always his way, so he behaved at that moment, not looking beyond the four cubits, either in front of him or behind him. Devoted as he was to the Torah, he saw nothing but the affairs of the Torah. As I looked at him, I saw that a deep hole was open at his feet. While he had been engrossed in prayer and study, a band of children, playing in front of the House of Study, had dug the hole and left it uncovered. I ran up and bowed before him, so that he should lean on me and pass over the hole.

But he, in his deep devotion to the Torah and the fear of God, saw neither the hole nor me, who had come to save him from it. I did not have the heart to raise my voice and warn him against the danger, in case I might distract him from his thoughts. I stood still, making myself like a staff, a stick, a block of wood, a lifeless object. The Almighty put it into the saint’s mind to lean on me. His body was light as an infant’s. But I shall feel it until they put dust on my eyes.

4

I went back home and lit the light. I opened a window and sat down to rest. The wind blew and threw the letter at my feet. I looked at the letter, and at my feet, and was too lazy to lift it, for I was so weary that my limbs had begun to fall asleep. I undressed and went to bed, thinking about the things that had happened to me and that saint I had seen, and I knew that a great event had happened that day. No greater event will ever happen to me again. I do not remember whether I was sad or joyful, but I remember that another feeling, to which no term of joy or sadness can apply, moved my heart. If I had departed this world at that hour I would not have been sorry.

I lay in bed and thought: Why do we fear death? Something whispered to me: Raise the blanket. Immediately my fingers were filled with that thing to which no term of joy or sadness applies. And it too, namely, that thing, spread gradually to my shoulders, and the nape of my neck, and the crown of my head. I still belonged to this world, but I knew that if I raised the blanket and put it over my head I could enter into another world in the twinkling of an eye. May all my well-wishers be privileged to experience such a good hour.

The wind blew again and moved the letter. The letter began to roll this way and that. I said to myself: If I die, the letter will remain without anyone to send it. I pushed off the blanket.

The moon peeped into the room, illuminating the floor, and a pale light covered my letter. I raised my right hand and made a kind of circle in the air. When I opened my eyes a second time I heard a bird twittering at my window. It noticed me and fell silent. Then it raised its voice and flew away.

A pleasant languor spread throughout my limbs, a languor that filled them with a pleasure beyond compare. My bones seemed to dissolve in my body and my spirit was light. Although I was lying among pillows and covers and blankets, I imagined that I was not lying among them, but was one of them, inanimate as they. I closed my eyes and lay still.

As I lay like this, a band of Arabs passed by; they sounded as if they were quarreling with each other, and the silence of the street doubled and redoubled their voices. I covered myself up to my head and over with my blanket, but the voices pierced the blanket. My peace had been interrupted, so I got out of bed.

Remembering my letter, I lifted it from the floor and spread it before me; then I put it aside and picked up a book to read, but I did not read it. I set aside my studies and sat down to copy out the glosses I had discovered, like those students of the Torah who write down comments and glosses in their notebooks. I dipped my pen in the ink, arranged the sheet of paper in front of me, and concentrated my thoughts in order to set them down. An hour passed, but nothing happened. Apart from the shadow of the pen, there was no shape of a letter to be seen on the paper. I bent my head over the sheet and looked at the shadow of my pen, which was coupled with the shadow of my fingers, like two different species who cannot be fertile.

I rose and picked up the pages I had written a few days before. As I read them, I began to feel a kind of writer’s itch in my hand, that sweet tingling one gets before starting work. I stretched out my hand over the paper and clothed my ideas in words. But the ideas disintegrated, like the snowman a child has made and wants to cover with a garment, which melts away as he tries to clothe it.

I read over again what I had written a few days before. When I started to read it, I thought I had got into the subject. I picked up the pen again. And again the pen cast a pale shadow on the blank paper.

As I found it hard to sit idle, I looked for something to do. I began to shake my books free of dust. Once I had started to shake a book, I began to regret the waste of time, for while I was shaking the dust off the book I might have studied it. When I sat down to study, it all started up again from the beginning. Things that used to refresh my soul turned to ashes in my mouth. An hour passed and another hour. I was trying to impress the words of the Torah on my heart, and my heart was giving me idle thoughts.

I went back to my writings and sat down to copy out what I had written recently; perhaps, while doing that, I could add something. And indeed I did not labor in vain. The pen moved on of its own accord, and added more and more.

When I examined what I had written, I saw that it did not add up to anything at all. I held the pen upright and made circles in the air with it. I remembered I had meant to kindle a light in memory of my grandfather. So I got up and went into town.

Before I went out I read the letter and saw that it was no worse than any other epistle of condolence. If Job said to his companions, who were privileged to have their words recorded in the Holy Scriptures, “How then comfort ye me in vain?” what can we write? I put the letter in an envelope and sent it off.

I went into town and walked from street to street and lane to lane until I reached the yard of the House of Study where I had been the evening before with Mr. Gedaliah Klein, and I heard a voice emerging from inside the yard saying, “Blessed be the glory of the Lord from His place.” I went into the yard and asked: “Where is the House of Study?”

A girl replied, “There’s no House of Study here.”

An old woman came out and asked, “What are you looking for?” I told her. “There is no House of Study here,” she said with a sigh. “But I was here last night,” I said to her. “Last night?” The old woman struck her forehead and said, “Well, Lord Almighty, now I remember! When I was a little girl, they used to show this place; they said there used to be a big House of Study here, and they used to study in it and pray, but because of all our sins it had disappeared.”

I bade her farewell and went to another House of Study.

This one was built many years ago, and it was built with the aid of a gentile king. His forefathers had destroyed Jerusalem and he helped to rebuild it, and we heard from the righteous men of that generation that when the righteous Messiah comes he will come and pray there. Some say this meant the gentile king, who would be converted and come to pray, but others said it meant the King Messiah. And it seems that those who applied the words to the King Messiah were right, for converts are not accepted in the world to come. When this synagogue was built, books and candelabra and Ark-cloths were donated from many countries, and the sages of Jerusalem used to adorn it with teaching and prayer. Now the house is empty, the plaster has peeled off the walls, the furnishings are broken and the books torn, the Ark-cloths are tattered and the candelabra rusted, and the students of the Torah have passed away. Hardly a bare quorum assembles there. And if the gates of Heaven are still open, nothing reaches them but a pennyworth of prayer.

I went in and found a blind old man sitting at a rickety table, shaking his head and muttering verses from the Psalms.

“Where is the sexton?” I asked.

“I am the sexton,” he replied.

I asked him to kindle a light in memory of my grandfather.

The sweet, clear smile of the blind gleamed in his two blind eyes, and he nodded, saying “I will.”

He went up to the lectern, took out a glass and raised it to the light, put in some oil, cut a length of wick and put it in the glass, set it on the lectern again, and said, “I will light it for the prayer.”

I took out four small coins and gave them to him. He took three and left one.

“I gave you four,” said I.

“I know,” he said, nodding.

He took the coin and put it into a charity box.

“Are you wary of even numbers?” I said to him.

He smiled and said, “A charity box should not be empty.”

I kissed the mezuzah and went out.

In the morning, when I sat down to study, my mind was not at rest. I stopped, and said: If I had looked longer for that House of Study I would have found it. I knew that this had come into my mind only to confuse me, but I thought of nothing else.

I tried to remember the faces of the worshippers who had appeared to me the night before in the House of Study. Apart from that illustrious scholar, whom I had recognized from a drawing, I knew no one there. And even he was not like any picture I knew.

To gather up enthusiasm for my work, I reminded myself how our recent sages, of blessed memory, devoted themselves to the Torah. For instance, there was the story of the author of the Face of Joshua, whose disciples once arrived late. “Why are you late?” he asked them when they came. “We were afraid to go out because of the cold,” they replied. He raised his face from the book — and his beard was frozen hard to the table. “True,” he said, “it is cold today.” Or like the story of Rabbi Jacob Emden, who hired a servant to announce to him every hour, “Woe, another hour has gone,” so that that illustrious scholar should give himself an account of what he had put right during that hour. But the acts of the righteous did not bring me to the point of action.

Since I was sitting idle, I became a breeding place for strange reflections, for idle men beget idle thoughts. My study lost its savor, and I felt my work was of little worth. I began to ask myself: What is the point of this work when the land is being regenerated, when a new generation is regenerating the land by its deeds?

I rebuked myself and said to myself: Go and rake over your own dunghill. And I started again to read the words of our sages, of blessed memory, but I found no contentment in their teachings.

I remembered the days when I dedicated myself to the Torah, but the memory did not bring me to the point of action.

I tried to arouse myself by idle acts. I started to arrange my books, one day according to the date when they were written and the next day according to subject, or in alphabetical order. I also prepared handsome notebooks and other accessories. Every day I invented something new. But before I managed to do it, I set it aside.

During that year and a half when I had dedicated myself to the Torah, I had received letters, books, and brochures which I had not taken the trouble to read. Now that I was idle, I looked at them.

I set aside all the books and brochures, and all the futile epistles, and turned to the letters of individuals I had left behind in exile in Poland and Germany, where they bewailed their exile and begged me to help them come to the Land of Israel.

I rested my hand on my table and spoke to myself: How shall I bring you up, how shall I bring you here, when you have no money to show the authorities?

I do not know whether it was in waking or in a dream, in vision or fancy, or perhaps it is neither dream nor fancy. Once a certain man wanted to come to the Land of Israel, and he did not have a thousand pounds to show the authorities. He took his wife and his sons and daughters, and wandered with them for several years until he reached the boundary of the Land of Israel, but the officers of the law would not let them in, so they threw themselves down before the gates of the land and wept. Sleep overtook them and they slumbered. Trees grew up around and concealed them, and they slept a long time. When they awoke, the father said to his son, “Take a coin and bring some bread.”

He went out and saw people plowing and sowing in gladness, with never a policeman or an officer. He came back and told his father, who took his wife and his sons and daughters, and they entered into the land. The whole city was astonished at them, for they thought all the exiles had already arrived, and there was no Jew left who had not come. They gave them a dwelling and food and a field to plow and sow. The father took out money to pay. “What are these scraps of metal?” the people said to him. “You call these scraps?” he replied. “If I had had a thousand like them, I would have been with you long ago.” Immediately it became a great joke throughout the city: for the sake of such things Jews had been prevented from entering the land, and the sons of the land had not been allowed to return. How foolish the world had been to torment the Jews for scraps of metal and paper notes.

The letters lay before me, and I had to answer them. I stretched out my hand and took the pen. I set a clean sheet before me and started to write, but apart from greetings and apologies I could not write a thing. I could not study the Torah, because of my confused mind: I could not stay at home for boredom. What could I do? I got up and went out to wander for a while in the streets of Jerusalem.

5

I walked about the streets of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, which had been still, gave voice. Buses and automobiles raced about as if pursued by demons; the noise of them rose into the heart of the heavens, and people dodged out of the way to avoid being run over. Every street and corner was full of soldiers, policemen and detectives, tarbushes red as blood and eyes angry and black with hatred. And the precious sons of Zion — some of them were dressed in velvet and satin, but others lay in the dunghills.

Even as the streets of Jerusalem have changed, so have its houses. Not all the prophecies have yet been fulfilled in the city, but some of its ruins have been rebuilt. The Lord buildeth Jerusalem, at any rate, even through gentiles, even through speculators. And there are houses that rise up to the sky. In the past, when the sons of Israel were lowly in their own eyes, He would, as it were, lower all the seven firmaments to be close to them; today, when they are proud and He is getting further away from them, they build their towers up to the sky.

There are other buildings in Jerusalem where you can find anything, whether you want it or not: shops where no one knows the use of the utensils they sell, or banks and coffeehouses and places of amusement and entertainment. If you find the night hangs heavy on your hands, and you do not know what to do with it, borrow money in a bank and go to a cinema or a coffeehouse or some other place of entertainment. And if you find it hard to wait until evening, stand at the side of the street and you will hear choruses on the gramophone. When Elijah, of blessed memory comes to bring tidings of redemption, we can only hope his voice will be heard above the noise of the automobiles and the screeching of the gramophones.

I stand in front of a large building full of shops selling clothing and foodstuffs, jewelry and ornaments for males and females. Signs hanging over the shops proclaim their wares in every possible tongue, and the building emits a vapor like the vapor of foreign lands.

“And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.” And the sages say: “One day the Holy One, blessed be He, will make Jerusalem of precious stones and diamonds.” And even now we can see in Jerusalem something like a pattern of the days to come, for its mountains are covered with all kinds of pleasant colors, were it not for the tall buildings that conceal the face of Jerusalem.

I wandered in the streets and squares of Jerusalem without seeking anything, and when I recalled that House of Study and those old men I had seen there, I knew that I would never find it and never see it.

But I saw new faces. These were the immigrants from Germany who had lately arrived. Where was their dignity, their property, their wisdom, their power? Those who had displaced the Divine Presence with their pride now walked along bowed with care. From time to time the Holy One, blessed be He, shows favor to one of the tribes of Israel and gives it wealth and honor, that they may help their brethren, but they ascribe all their good fortune to their own merits, to their clever behavior, to the masters of the land who have given them good laws because they are better and more honest than the rest of their brethren. When the Holy One, blessed be He, sees this, He, as it were, turns His face away from that tribe. Immediately the wicked men among the gentiles bring down ruin upon them and they go down into the dust.

As I was walking, I met one of the German immigrants whom I knew. I stopped and asked how he was.

He began to tell me the same things he had told me recently, all that the wicked men had done to him there in Germany, what he had suffered, how much money they had taken from him, and how at last he and his wife and his children had escaped without a penny.

I comforted him as I had comforted him before. “You are fortunate to have come here,” I said, “for from now onwards, no wicked hand has power over you.”

Now that I had mentioned the Land of Israel in his presence, he began to abuse the nation and the population, their behavior and demeanor; his room was minute, and the rent, to boot, would not be too small for a baronial hall; the maid downstairs put on ladylike airs; the workers were all Left, and the merchants bent on theft. The phones had gone crazy, the children were lazy; immigrants from many lands talked with their hands; the trains were always late, the beer was second rate. People didn’t know how to pray, and they spat on the floor; the politicians made you pay, always asking for more; the men at the top talked and talked without a stop; mosquitoes were a pest, and gave you no rest; at funeral rites there were barbarous sights. In short, life was vile at home and outside, above and below, whatever you tried.

I said: ‘And thou shalt see the good of Jerusalem,’ the Scripture said. A Jew ought to see the good of Jerusalem and not its evil.” And I went on: “Perhaps you have heard from the old men of Jerusalem how many troubles our fathers found in the Land of Israel, for the land was in ruins at that time, and they were plagued by diseases; when they got out of one trouble, along came another, worse than the first. But they paid no heed to their troubles; they were happy to live in the land and gave praise and thanks to the Creator of all the worlds for choosing us out of all the nations and giving us the Land of Israel.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and said, “Those people had God in their hearts.”

I said to him in a whisper, “God exists now too.”

“But not within us,” he said.

I said to him: “A certain hasidic master was asked where the Holy One, blessed be He, dwells. He told them: Wherever He is allowed to enter, there He dwells.”

6

In these days I visited some of the new neighborhoods at whose dedication ceremonies I had rejoiced. Most of the little houses were rickety; their builders no longer lived in them, for they had built them with loans and could not pay, so the banks had sold their houses to others. The same thing happened to the purchasers: they borrowed from the banks — borrowed from one bank and paid to another, so they had to go to the moneylenders — and anyone who falls into their hands never recovers. But so long as they paid the interest they were allowed to stay.

One day I found myself in a certain neighborhood in Jerusalem which Mr. Gedaliah Klein had an affection for, because he had helped some of its people with a loan at one or two per cent less than the banks usually take.

I walked about in the neighborhood. A row of houses on one side and a row of houses on the other, with a kind of road winding between, producing weeds and growing thorns, and a broken-down car sunk in the ground. Some of the houses are unpainted; others have their walls calcimined to look like slabs of marble. Some are on the point of collapse; the builders did not want to invest their money in deepening the foundations, for if they had sunk deeper foundations they would not have had enough to build the houses. The soil of Jerusalem, which was accustomed to sanctuaries, does not like the light houses, so it undermines them until they collapse. Another thing this soil does is to grow bushes and trees inside the houses. Usually, bushes and trees that are planted need care; here they flourish and grow of themselves, and break up the floor and the walls. And why does the soil not make the gardens grow around the houses? Because if the people of the neighborhood plow and hoe and water to grow a little greenery, their bad neighbors come along and loose their goats on them. From the Talmud we learn that the wicked Titus laid waste our land, but the evidence of our eyes teaches us that the goats are laying it waste, and it is still far from clear which did more damage.

I walk about in the neighborhood. Peace and quiet everywhere; not a living soul but goats and cats and dogs. Those who have work in town have gone to town, and those who have nothing to do have gone to look for work. And there are some people who have despaired of work, so they stay at home and recite psalms, or study Mishnah or Midrash. As for the women, some of them have kinds of shops in towns and some have gone to buy vegetables in the market, for the two shopkeepers in the neighborhood have nothing to sell and are going around the town to plead with their creditors. And where are the children? Those who have shoes for their feet have gone to town to study, and those who have no shoes are playing with their brothers at home, for the rainy days have come, and if their clothes are tattered and they have no shoes they cannot play outside.

I walk through the neighborhood, in the length of it and in the breadth of it, looking at the rickety windows with their slackly hanging shutters. On one house at the top of the neighborhood hangs a tin sign bearing the name of a certain benefactor after whom the street is named. The rains and winds of two or three winters have obliterated the name of the man who has taken to himself the name of a street in Jerusalem, and left him no name, but only a buckled sign.

As I walked through the neighborhood the silence was broken by the arrival of a bus full of people. They stretched their limbs as they got off, some to collect taxes and some to collect charity, and some to examine the houses to see which were fit to be security for loans. As they found no one, they started to pester me. As I could tell them nothing, they insulted me. If Mr. Gedaliah Klein were alive and I were walking with him, no one would dare to speak to me like that.

The driver went into one of the houses to rest awhile from the fatigue of the journey, for part of the way from the main road to the neighborhood is covered with holes and pitfalls, and part with spikes and stones; the bus is also rickety, and unless the driver lent it some of his strength it would not go more than a yard or two. Since the visitors wanted to leave and could not find him, they went in to have a look at the synagogue.

The synagogue is a fine building outside and inside. Pious women in America donated the money to build it, but they left one place unfinished, for in the course of construction a great deal of money was wasted to no purpose, and when the donors were asked to make up the difference they could not do it, for America was short of money at the time. So one corner was left uncompleted, but if you do not look in that direction you do not see what is missing.

The synagogue rises higher than any of the houses in the neighborhood — a fine building outside and inside. The floor is made of large stones, and the ceiling is white as the whitewash of the Temple. The walls are straight, and there are twelve windows in them, like the number of the gates of prayer in the Heavens. Our father Jacob, on whom be peace, produced twelve tribes, and the Holy One, blessed be He, correspondingly opened twelve windows in the firmament to receive the prayers of each tribe. But the seed of the tribes were fruitful and split up into Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Perushim and Hasidim — and the Hasidim, too, are split up according to their rabbis, each group praying in a different style. But the Heavens are still intact and no new gates are opened in them, and every worshipper wants the prayers to be recited in his own style, so that there is great confusion, and quarrels break out.

At last the driver came out, sat down in the bus, hooted and blared and hooted again. The travelers pushed their way in. The driver hooted and blared, started up the bus, and set off for town. Again the neighborhood was silent, and were it not for the thick, heavy smell of burnt gasoline which defiled the air there would be no sign that human beings had been here.

I saw a man sitting beside his house and reading the Book of Legends. I went up to him and talked to him, praising the late Mr. Gedaliah Klein, without whom there would be no one living here. The man put down the Book of Legends, sighed and smiled, and said, “It’s a hopeless mess. Half my house is a wreck and the other half a ruin — and the whole of it is mortgaged. If it were sold to pay the debt, not even a small part of the debt would be settled, and if it remains in my hands — where will I get the money to repair it? And so far I’ve only been talking about myself. The others are in the same predicament, and there’s another difficulty: we’re far from town, where the people work, and to get to town we need the bus. The bus isn’t always there, and the money’s not there either. So we go on foot, but you cannot be sure you will get there safely. In times of peace our bad neighbors threaten your money, and in times of stress they threaten your life.”

“Well,” I asked him, “what will you do?” “What we ought to do we certainly shall not do,” he replied with a smile. “But I only hope the future is no worse than the past, for nothing is so bad that there’s nothing worse. Master Gedaliah Klein, may he rest in peace, was a great man and meant to help the builders of the neighborhood. He came forward when they were in difficulties and found them money at a low rate of eight per cent when people pay nine or ten and up to twelve. But anyone who gets into debt has to leave his house in the end.”

“And is there no hope for your neighborhood?” I asked. “There is one hope,” he replied. “And what is it?” I asked. “When the Messiah comes,” he said, “and the wolf dwells with the lamb, we shall no longer be afraid of our bad neighbors, and the goats will do no more harm either.” “And until the Messiah comes?” I said. He smiled and replied, “The Old Man of Shpoli used to say, ‘Master of the universe, I can assure Thee that the world will go on degenerating in this way until the coming of the Redeemer.’ True, there was once a chance to put things right. You see the two rows of houses, on the road to our neighborhood, that separate us from the town and the next neighborhood? All these houses, as you see them, are new, recently built. But before they were built, that was virgin soil, and we could get from one neighborhood to the other in a short time. The owners of the land offered to sell it to us, and we agreed. So we went to our wealthy neighbors and said to them, ‘This land is up for sale; buy it, and both of us will no longer be surrounded by the Arabs, who terrorize us so long as we are few. And we will pay our share for the bus and the watchmen and all the other public facilities that every Jewish community must have to survive.’ But our neighbors sent us away empty-handed. After all, they had moved away from the town and its paupers, and then paupers come along and propose to get closer. We started going around from one institution to another, but they put us off, some for budgetary reasons and some for economic. ‘It isn’t enough that you haven’t succeeded,’ they said, ‘but you want to drag other people into this mess.’ So we were in despair. Meanwhile, along came Syrians from Syria, bought the land, and built themselves large houses. So we are still living in fear and trembling, and we can’t keep up any public facility, not even a grocery. Our dignified neighbor has also suffered for its pride, for the Arabs have surrounded it, and it is far from any Jewish settlement, and the bus hardly comes for lack of passengers, for anyone who has no house of his own moves to town, and new houses are not being built there, for no one builds his home in a neighborhood whose people are leaving. And even those who own their own houses would be glad to leave, and this garden city, builded in beauty, is gradually being abandoned.”

As we were talking, a bus came from town and the whole neighborhood went out to meet it. Women and children got off, carrying torn and tattered baskets, with a little cabbage, a little beet, a little turnip, a little garlic and onion in them, and a loaf or two on top — all those things a poor man covets. They set down the baskets and sacks, got into the bus again, and threw out bundles of rusty spikes and old iron hoops they had bought in town to reinforce their tottering houses; some brought out crates and some cradles.

The neighborhood began to hum and bustle. Even those who had been hidden in their houses came out and asked what news there was in town and when they would say the afternoon prayer. Little by little, the rest of the people returned from town with their sons, the young ones from the heder and the older ones from the yeshivah. And from end to end of the neighborhood, people came running to the synagogue.

In the meantime, Arabs came by, on their way back from their work in town to the neighborhood villages. They were followed by shepherds with their flocks, who stirred up clouds of dust. The people of the neighborhood pushed their way through the sheep, groaning and panting.

It was time for me to return to town, so I got into the bus. An hour passed but it did not move. I asked the driver when he would start. “What’s wrong with staying here?” said the driver. I said to him, “If you are not going, tell me and I will go on foot.” “Do you think I’m a prophet, that I should know if I’m going?” he said. “If you’re not afraid of tiring out your legs, get up and walk. If I find passengers and start off, I’ll pick you up on the way and take you in; if I don’t, I’ll stay the night here. Nice neighborhood, isn’t it? Refreshing air! Pity you can’t live on air.”

I got off the bus and set out on foot. Fine, big houses accompanied me most of the way. When were they built? We did not read about them in the papers; we were not invited to the dedications, but there they are, sound and solid. Every house is surrounded by a garden, with an iron fence around it, so that no goat can get in. The Lord buildeth Jerusalem, sometimes by means of Jews and sometimes by means of gentiles.

7

Once I was going to and fro, as usual, in the streets of Jerusalem, when I saw large posters announcing a memorial meeting that night on the thirtieth day after the passing of Mr. Gedaliah Klein. Ah, thirty days had passed since the day I wrote the letter of condolence.

I took out my watch to see if the time had not yet come for the commemoration, and I saw that the time had not yet come. To pass the time I went from wall to wall and from poster to poster. I doubt if there was a man in Jerusalem that day who was so well versed as I in the names and titles of the eulogists.

I began to be afraid I might have made a mistake in the order of the days, and the day of the commemoration had passed. I went into a bookshop to buy a calendar tablet.

The shopkeeper said, mockingly, “We are just going to print a calendar for next year and you are looking for yesteryear.”

“I am content with the old tablets,” I said.

To pass the time I bought a newspaper. Since I had the paper, I read all the articles that were printed on the thirtieth day of Mr. Gedaliah Klein’s passing. In the past, all the deeds of men were included in a single verse, such as “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him,” but now that knowledge has expanded and the deeds of men have multiplied, we cannot complete all their praises in one sentence.

It is almost eight o’clock. The shopkeepers are locking up their shops, with double locks, for fear of the thieves who have multiplied in Jerusalem. Buses race by, and so do passersby. As they run, they bump into peddlers and broom-sellers, beggars and flute-players, reformers, crazy men and crazy women, distributors of leaflets and advertisers of merchandise, a dog who has lost his master and a mistress who has lost her dog.

As you escape from these, the shoeshine boys take hold of your feet. While they are sharing out your feet, paperboys offer you their newspapers. As you stand and read, agitators come up and fill your hands with pamphlets. If you get rid of them, women come along and pin all kinds of tags on you. You stop to pay, but your pocket is empty, for in the meantime pickpockets have extracted your purse. As you stand in despair, wanting to go home, along comes a procession of boys. While you wait for them to pass, a bus goes by and runs over an ass. You run to lift it; along come the police and strike you with their batons for obstructing the populace and holding up the traffic. When you run away and find a place to hide, you come across a girl who has been attacked by zealots. While they are punishing her because they saw her going with the English, a young man throws vitriol in another girl’s face and blinds her. The gramophone shrieks, “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob,” while the radio sings back, “Happy are ye, O Israel.” Meanwhile, the whole street lights up, revealing the picture of a naked woman, and a loudspeaker proclaims to the heavens, “Come and see the enchantress!”

The streetlamps, square and round and semicircular, illuminate the streets of the city, in addition to the moon and the stars. I walk in their light and read all kinds of placards about new productions of plays like Thy People and Hard to be a Jew. And the gramophone screeches, “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob,” while the radio replies, “Happy are ye, O Israel,” and the loudspeakers drown their voices, and the smell of falafel permeates the air. Little by little the street returns to normal. Buses rush and people push; some of their heads are hairy, and some of their chins are double; some of them float on air, and some are always in trouble; men with serious mien and women with delicate hands chatter in all the tongues of all the far-off lands; every stalwart lad and every maiden ripe puffs at a cigarette or pulls away at a pipe. The coffeehouses are full of people young and old; the men make eyes at the girls, and the girls are just as bold; the men drink beer and whiskey, the women paint their faces — O Muse, what have you to do with such peculiar places? The bars are full of soldiers, the British Mandate’s men—“Drink up and then bring up, my lads, and fill your mugs again!” And now I go to mourn a man who is no more — O Muse, be silent now, and do not weep so sore.

8

The platform is draped in black, and a candelabrum draped in black illuminates a picture of the deceased hanging over the platform. His face is the face of a successful man, unmarred even by death.

The assembly hall is full and still the people come. The first arrivals have been seated by the ushers on the middle benches, while the latecomers are seated above, near the platform. Last come those for whom the platform is waiting.

Mr. Schreiholz mounted — he is the principal speaker everywhere. He made a sad face and started in a whisper, like a man who cannot speak for grief. Suddenly he raised his voice and stretched his hand upwards with his fingers spread, seeking a word to express the full depth of his thought. When he found the word he began to spout with growing fluency, declaiming at the top of his voice: “The deceased was…, the deceased was…,” describing, between one “was” and the next, his recollections of where he had seen the deceased, and all the rest of it.

When he had finished, he got off the platform, pressed the hands of the mourners, climbed onto the platform again, and sat down, like an orator who knows his place.

Next came a teacher who had become a banker. As a man who knew the taste of learning and the value of money, he emphasized the virtues of the deceased, who had combined learning with trading, and by virtue of his talents had succeeded in setting several of Jerusalem’s alms-hunting institutions on a sound financial basis and making them into national institutions, which added to the national capital and increased the strength of the nation.

After he had finished, he got down off the platform, pressed the hands of the mourners, and found a place to stand, like a man who seeks no more than a station for his feet.

Next came a townsman of the deceased. He recalled the honor of his house abroad, which was a place of assembly for Lovers of Zion and devotees of the Hebrew tongue. And first and foremost of all the deceased’s achievements in his town was the splendid edifice of the modernized heder, which was the archetype of the Hebrew school, whose waters we drink and in whose shade we shelter.

After he had finished, he got down off the platform, pressed the hands of the mourners and pushed his way in somewhere, for during his eulogy someone else had taken his place.

Next came the last of the eulogists, Mr. Aaron Ephrati, a dignified old man respected by all. He started to sing the praises of the deceased, who had served the entire community without distinction of rich or poor, for since he had grown up in wealth and lived all his days in wealth, he regarded wealth as a matter of course, and not as a special virtue that entitles its possessors to make distinctions between rich and poor. And when he had set up the modernized heder, he had not behaved like those wealthy men who have their sons and daughters educated in the schools of the gentiles and leave the modernized heder for the common people, but sent his sons and daughters to the same modernized heder, so that they should get a plain Jewish education. And so as to combine the light of Judaism with the beautiful and the useful, he had sent them to high school and the university, so that they might fulfill the maxim: “Be a man and a Jew both in your tent and outside.” Finally, Mr. Ephrati turned to the sons and daughters of the deceased and said to them: “Your father has still left you things to do, for his aspirations were in keeping with his greatness. Though he is dead, you are alive, and the sons must add to the deeds of their fathers.”

After Mr. Ephrati had finished speaking, the cantor of the synagogue climbed onto the platform, took out a hexagonal velvet biretta, bent down and put the biretta on his head, took out a cantor’s tuning fork and put it in his mouth, bent and struck the tuning fork on the table, stuck it in his mouth again, put it close to his ear, and began to sing “O God, full of mercy.”

Since I am no judge of music, I was free to think my own thoughts. This prayer used to make my heart throb, I mused as I stood there, but today it just bores me. And another thought occurred to me: there are theater melodies which sound, when sung by the performers, like prayers and supplications, but sometimes prayers and supplications, when they are sung by the cantors, sound like theater tunes. On the cantor’s head the biretta quivered; on his throat his Adam’s apple shivered; around the hall the echoes rolled, over consolers and consoled; while biretta and pate, with every nod, invoked the infinite mercy of God.

I stand looking at the distinguished people who have come to pay their respects to the memory of Mr. Gedaliah Klein. Although I would not compare my work with theirs, I feel sorry that I do not succeed in doing my own work. And the man with the biretta, with his cantor’s tongs, warbles his notes like a bird’s sweet songs, stretching his throat toward God on high, emitting each word with a groan or a sigh; and everyone listens to the lamentation — wiping his tears, or his perspiration.

All the people are on their feet, including the daughter of the deceased. Her black veil quivers over her comely features, and she is surrounded by important people, whose faces are pink with satiety and complacency, like practical men rooted in the life of the nation, who can adapt their behavior to the nation’s needs, or the nation’s needs to their behavior. Fine clothes like theirs were never seen in Jerusalem until Hitler started killing the Jews, so that all the great craftsmen fled, and some of them settled in the Land of Israel.

I look at the clothes and say to myself: I will get some clothes like these too; perhaps I will raise my spirits. But I am afraid the great tailors may see how humble I am and not take much trouble with such a fellow; they may not even make me as good a garment as this one, which was made by the Jerusalem tailor. And if they make me a fine garment, my friends and relatives will be ashamed of their clothes when they meet me, as I am ashamed to be seen by these men with their fine clothes. But all these were futile thoughts, for to get fine clothes you need money, and to get money you need the desire for money, and to have the desire, you must have a desire for the desire. And where will I get the strength for those desires?

The memorial light was still burning there, when the cantor finished the memorial prayer. He doffed his biretta and wiped his pate, and put on his hat, brooding on his fate: “If I sang in the theater, at home or abroad, all the beautiful women would applaud; but here not a soul has a word to say — that’s your reward when you sing to pray.”

After the recital of the mourners’ kaddish, the audience mingled with each other, shook out their clothes, which had got wrinkled with sitting, and took out cigarettes for a smoke. “If anyone tells you there’s such a thing as free will,” said Mr. Schreiholz, “don’t believe him. For two and a half hours I was waiting to smoke, but I didn’t do it out of respect for this solemn occasion.”

People from the suburbs who were in the hall started to push their way out to get their buses. I should have hurried, too, and run for my bus, but I wanted to pay my respects to Mr. Gedaliah Klein’s daughter.

She sat like a mourner, her black hat adding to her charm; a peaceful sadness covered her face, like a well-bred woman who has been bereaved, but has not been bereft of her distinction. Public leaders, men and women, came up to her one after another and pressed her hand, and she pressed the hands of them all.

I bowed my head and greeted her. But she did not notice me. I bowed and greeted her again. Perhaps she nodded slightly, and perhaps she did not nod to me at all. I felt no grudge against her. Why should she have to move her head in return for two or three lines I had written her? Countless letters of condolence had been sent her, and they were still being sent.

I left the assembly hall. The entire square was full of cars for Mr. Klein’s family and the eulogists. A little while later, nothing was left of them but the odor of burnt gasoline and cosmetics and dust.

I set off for the bus station, but when I reached it the bus had gone. I waited for the next, but it did not come, so I gave up the idea of riding home and set out on foot.

An old carriage came along. The coachman reined in his horses and said to me, “Get in.” I felt no desire to get in. The horses set off without me. Silently, silently, they moved off without lifting their feet, and, if I am not mistaken, the motion of the carriage was not visible either.

The air was clear; the moon and the stars shone. The earth was soft; it would have been easy to open it and cover oneself up with it like a blanket. How tired I was, how I wanted to rest. The coachman came back and rode around me with his coach. I looked up at him, hoping that he might take me into the coach, but he took no notice and did not take me in. The horses lifted their feet; not a sound was heard as they moved, but the echo quivered in my ears until I reached home and went in.

9

When I entered, I found Mr. Gedaliah Klein sitting at my table. His head was bowed toward his breast, and his cane lay between his knees. He stirred, raised his head, and whispered: “You here?” “I have just come,” I replied in a whisper. He rubbed his eyes. “I felt sleepy and dropped off,” he said.

His face was weary and aged. Since I last left him, he had suddenly become very old. Apart from the fox-fur coat he wore, there was nothing about him that was not old.

I pretended not to notice that he had aged considerably, for Mr. Gedaliah Klein desired the honor of age coupled with the vigor of youth, and not the old age which is a burden and a shame. He looked at me and said, “I have not seen you for decades. Tell me now, my dear friend, why do you not come to visit me? Or perhaps I have seen you in the meantime? Where have you been all the time? And where, for instance, did you spend the whole evening?” I could not bring myself to tell him where I had been, so I was silent.

He pricked up his right ear, supported it on his right hand, and said, “I did not hear what you said. Now for another matter: Where did I leave you that night I saw you last? If I am not mistaken, there was an old courtyard, and candles were burning low, and some man, a sexton, pestered me. Don’t you remember, my dear friend?” I told him.

“One thing is clear,” said Mr. Klein; “there was a House of Study there. You see, my dear friend, I forget nothing. What did we go to that House of Study for? If I remember rightly, you wanted to kindle a light for the repose of your grandfather’s soul. I hear the sound of horses. Did you come home in a carriage?”

“No, I came on foot.”

“So what is the carriage doing here?”

I said to him, “Perhaps you know where that House of Study is? I am looking for it but cannot find it.”

Mr. Klein smiled at me as people do at a child who is trying to get something easy. He raised his hands to his eyes to settle his spectacles. Then he pried open his eyes with his fingernails and looked straight at me. “Did you put out the light?” he said. “You didn’t? So why don’t I see? What did you say? You are looking for the…What are you looking for? Speak into my ear. When one’s eyes are affected, all one’s limbs are weakened.”

I went up close to him and said, “I am looking for the House of Study.”

“You are looking for the House of Study?” he repeated in a tone of surprise. “Which House of Study are you looking for? Perhaps the one where you were with me? Give me my cane and I will draw you where it is.”

I took his cane from between his knees and put it in his hand.

He took the cane and began to grope with it like a blind man in an unfamiliar place. The cane in his hand quivered, his hands quivered, and he quivered with the cane. He gripped the cane with all his strength, but his strength was gone. His face was no longer the same, and he, too, began to change, until he was entirely changed, and no longer resembled himself. And perhaps it was not he, but that old man, that blind old man who had kindled the memorial light for my grandfather, may he rest in peace.

I waited for him to look kindly on me, as he had done at first in the Great Synagogue when he whispered verses from the psalms. But his face was frozen and his eyes devoid of laughter. I felt it hard to stand in front of a man who used to be courteous to me but now paid me no attention, so I turned my face away from him. When I turned my face away, he stood up over me with his cane. I felt afraid of him and closed my eyes. He took hold of the cane and began to draw with it, making six marks. A house emerged and rose up, like that House of Study. I tried to enter but could not find the door. The old man raised his cane and knocked twice on the wall. An opening appeared, and I went in.

Fernheim

1

When he returned he found the house locked. After he rang once, twice, and then a third time, the doorkeeper appeared, folded her hands on her stomach, leaned her head on her shoulder, and stood gaping a moment. “Well,” she said, “who do I see? Mr. Fernheim! Bless my soul, it is Mr. Fernheim. So, then, Mr. Fernheim’s come back. Then why did they say he wouldn’t come back? And all this ringing — it’s really quite useless, because the house is empty and there’s no one to open it for him, because Mrs. Fernheim left and locked the house and took the keys with her. She didn’t imagine there’d be any need for keys, like now, for instance, that Mr. Fernheim’s back and wants to get into his house.”

Fernheim felt he had better say something before the woman inundated him with more derision. He forced himself to speak, but his reply was short, stammering — and meaningless.

The doorkeeper went on, “After the baby died, her sister Mrs. Steiner came, and Mr. Steiner with her too. They took Mrs. Fernheim with them to their summer home. My son Franz, who carried her bags for her, heard that the Steiners plan to stay there in the village until the big Israelite holy days at the end of the summer, right before the fall, and I’d guess Mrs. Fernheim won’t come back to the city before then. Why should she hurry, now that the baby’s gone? Does he need a kindergarten? Poor little thing, he kept getting thinner and thinner till he died.”

Fernheim pressed his lips together tightly. Finally he nodded at the doorkeeper, stuck his fingertips into his vest pocket, took out a coin, and gave it to her. Then he turned and left.

Fernheim spent two days in the city. He left no cafe unvisited, nor did he neglect to speak to each and every one of his acquaintances. He went to the cemetery to his son’s grave. On the third day he pawned the present he had bought for his wife, went to the railroad station, and bought himself a round-trip ticket to Lückenbach, the village where Hans Steiner, his brother-in-law, had a summer home. There, years back, Fernheim had met Inge when he was friendly with Karl Neiss, who had brought him along to see her. But Karl Neiss had not realized what was to come of it all.

2

When Fernheim entered the villa, Gertrude, his sister-in-law, was standing on the porch in front of a basket of laundry, folding linens she had taken down from the line. She greeted him politely and poured him a glass of lemonade, but without the least show of joy, as if he had not returned from prison camp, as if years had not passed without her having seen him. When he asked her where Inge was, she looked shocked, as if that were too personal a question. Finally, when he looked at the door opening to another room, Gertrude said, “You can’t go in; Zigbert’s bed is there. Remember Zigbert, the child of my old age?” As soon as she mentioned Zigbert she smiled inwardly for calling him “the child of my old age” when at that very moment a new child was stirring inside her. As she was speaking, Zigbert entered.

Gertrude stroked her boy’s head, arranged the curls tumbling over his forehead, and said, “Moved your bed again? Now didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t move the bed’? But you, Zigbert, you don’t listen, and you went and moved it again. You shouldn’t have done that, my son.”

The little boy stood wondering what bed his mother was talking about. And if he had moved the bed, why shouldn’t he have moved it? But there wasn’t any bed in the first place. And if there really had been a bed and he had moved it, why, his mother should have been proud that he was big and strong enough to move a bed if he wanted to! But everything that Mother was saying was strange, because there wasn’t any bed. Zigbert wrinkled up his face at this yoke he had to bear. Nevertheless, he was ready to overlook it if there were the least bit of truth in what his mother had said.

By this time Fernheim realized nothing was in the way, but because he respected Gertrude and did not want to make a liar of her, he did not open the door.

Hans must be told that Fernheim is here, thought Gertrude, but if I leave Fernheim alone he could open the door, cross the room, and go right into Inge’s room; and it won’t do for him to see her before Hans talks with him. Anyway, it’s not good that he came just today, with Inge sitting there waiting for Karl Neiss. Maybe Neiss has arrived already, maybe he’s sitting with Inge. There’s no need for these two to come across each other right in front of her.

She saw Zigbert standing by. “Go to Daddy and tell him that…”

“Whom do we have here?” Fernheim stretched his arms out to the little boy and began speaking affectionately. “Why, this is young Steiner of the house of Starkmat and Steiner. What’s this, Zigbert, you don’t say hello to your dear uncle, Uncle Werner, as though you weren’t happy that he came back from prison where the enemy fed him live snakes and gave him snake poison to drink? Come, Zigbert, my sweet, let me kiss you.” He caught hold of the child, lifted him up, and kissed him on the lips.

Zigbert wrinkled up his mouth and glowered. Fernheim took out half of a cigar, lit it with his lighter, and said to Zigbert, “Don’t you want to put the flame out? Open your mouth and blow on it; it goes out almost by itself.”

Gertrude addressed her son. “Go, sweetheart, and tell Daddy that — that Uncle Werner has come and would like to see him.”

As he was leaving she called him back. Gertrude wanted to warn the child not to tell anyone, least of all Aunt Inge, that Fernheim had come, until he told his father first. But realizing that it was impossible to speak in front of Fernheim, she sent him off.

Zigi stopped, waiting for his mother to call him back as she had the first time. Seeing that she remained silent, he left.

“Daddy, Daddy,” he called, “Mommy wants you. A man is here.”

“Who’s here?” Steiner called down from the attic.

“A man,” the child repeated, saying nothing more.

“Go on and tell Mother that I’m coming.”

“I don’t want to,” said the child.

“You don’t want to what?” asked the father.

“I don’t want to go to Mother.”

“Why don’t you want to go to Mother?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“That man.”

“What about that man?”

“Because.”

“You’re acting stubborn, Zigbert; I don’t like stubborn people.”

The child went off crying.

Fernheim sat himself down, as did Gertrude. While she folded her linens, he clenched a cigar stub between his lips. She sat quietly, uttering not a word, while he was astounded at himself for sitting next to his wife’s sister and saying nothing. She waited for her husband to come; he puffed away furiously.

The cigar stub had almost vanished, but still he gripped it between his lips. I see, thought Gertrude, that the new laundress does a good job. The sheet is sparkling white. It needs scrubbing, though. Werner’s coming back — it’s not good. But now that he’s come, maybe there can be an end to this business. The towels gleam more than the sheets, but their edges are crumbled. Obviously, the laundress ironed two towels as though they were one. What’s this, pigeon droppings? Doesn’t she know you have to clean the rope before hanging the wash? Hans still hasn’t come, and I can’t make up my mind whether or not to invite Werner to lunch, since we’ve already invited Karl Neiss. But just so he shouldn’t feel insulted, I’ll pour him another glass of lemonade. He’s looking for an ashtray. He’s already thrown the cigar into the garden.

3

The footsteps of Hans Steiner resounded, and the aroma of the fine cigar in his mouth wafted into the room. He had a vexed look, the kind he wore regularly when having to appear before a stranger. As soon as he came in and saw Fernheim, his pent-up anger doubled. Utter amazement covered his face. Scratching his moustache and scarcely opening his lips, he muttered, “You’re here?”

Fernheim, trying to look cheerful, answered, “There’s a good deal of truth in that, Hans,” immediately extending both hands in greeting.

Hans presented him with two fingertips and said something indistinguishable, without moving lips or tongue. “You’re back,” he added.

Fernheim replied jokingly, “That, we must admit, is correct.”

“When did you come back?”

“When did I come back? I came back two days ago; to be precise, three days ago.”

Hans flicked the cigar ashes into the glass of lemonade. “You’ve been here three days. Then I would assume you’ve come across some people you know.”

“What if I did?” answered Fernheim heatedly.

“If you happened to meet some people you know,” said Hans, “maybe you happened to hear a little something.”

“‘A little something,’ meaning—”

“Meaning there have been some changes made.”

“Yes,” said Fernheim, “lots of things have changed. I wrote that I would come on a certain day, at a certain hour, on a certain train; and when I got there I found the railroad station empty. Actually it wasn’t empty. On the contrary, it was filled with mobs of noisy people who had come to welcome their brothers and sons and husbands returning from the war; but Werner Fernheim, who shed his blood in the war, who was a prisoner of war, who spent a year in a prison camp — no one was available to come welcome him.”

Steiner raised his head above Fernheim’s. “In your opinion, Werner, who should have come?”

“Heaven forbid that I meant you,” he replied. “I realize that Mr. Steiner is an important personage, a man weighed down with serious business, so serious it even exempted him from army duty; but there is someone here who, had she come to greet her husband, would not have been acting altogether outrageously. What do you think, brother-in-law, suppose Inge had come? Does that sound so very unreasonable?”

Steiner tried to smile, but, as he was not used to smiling, his face assumed a look of surprise. He made a fist of his left hand, looked at his fingernails, and said, “If my ears aren’t liars, Inge should have rushed to the railroad station to meet you. Is that it, Werner?”

“Why are you so surprised?” asked Fernheim. “Isn’t it usual for a wife to greet her husband returning from a distant country? And what a distant country I’m returning from! Anyone else in my place would have died a hundred deaths by now and wouldn’t have lived to see the face of his loved ones.” Suddenly he raised his voice and asked fiercely, “Where’s Inge?”

Steiner looked straight at his brother-in-law and then turned his eyes away. Then he looked at him again and calmly flicked off the cigar ash. “Inge is on her own; we don’t pry into her affairs. And let me advise you, Werner: don’t be prying into her affairs.”

Gertrude sat thinking, This is a man, this is a man. This is a man who can handle anyone. Tonight I’ll tell him my secret — that I’ve got a new child ready for him. But now I’ll leave them alone.

The whites of Fernheim’s eyes reddened as though they had been pricked and blood were trickling out. “What do you mean,” he shouted, “‘Don’t be prying into her affairs’? It seems to me I still have some authority over her.”

Gertrude rose to leave.

“Sit down, Gertrude,” said Hans. “If you don’t want to hear what this fellow has to say, maybe you’d like to hear what I have to say. Now, you, Werner, look here. If you haven’t told it to yourself, I’ll tell you. The world you left behind when you went to war has changed, and what concerns us most has changed, too. I don’t know just how clear these things are to you, or just how pleasant you find them. If you like, I’m ready to explain them to you.”

Fernheim raised his eyes and tried to look straight at his brother-in-law, whose face at that moment was not pleasant to look at. He lowered his head and his eyes and sat despondent. Steiner shouted suddenly, “Is there no ashtray here? Excuse me, Gertrude, if I say that here, on this spot, there should always be an ashtray.”

Gertrude rose and got an ashtray.

“Thanks very much, Gertrude. The ash has already dropped onto the rug. What were we talking about? You want an explanation, Werner. In that case, let me begin at the beginning. Once there was a daughter of a well-to-do family who was engaged to a certain man; only the ceremony had not yet taken place. It chanced to happen that a certain fellow started to frequent this man’s company. The man who was engaged to the girl disappeared, and this other fellow who had been trailing along after him came and started courting the girl, until finally he won her and she married him, Why did he win her and why did she marry him? This I leave to riddle solvers. I can’t say why. From the very start the match was no match, but what happened happened. At any rate, there’s no need that it be so forever. Do you understand, my dear fellow, what I’m driving at? You don’t understand? Amazing. I’m speaking quite frankly.”

“Is that the only reason?” said Werner.

“What I’ve said seems trivial?” Hans replied.

“At any rate,” said Werner, “I’d like to know if that’s the only reason.”

“There’s that and there’s another reason…”

“And what’s the other reason?”

Steiner fell silent.

Werner went on, “I beg of you, tell me what that other reason is. You say, ‘There’s that and there’s another reason.’ What is that other reason?”

“What you speak of as another reason,” said Steiner, “is something else again.”

“And if I want to know?”

“If you want to know,” said Steiner, “I’ll tell you.”

“Well?”

“Well, the same man to whom the young woman was engaged was found alive, and we trust that you won’t go about setting up obstacles. You notice, Werner, that I’m not bringing up your absconding with the funds and staining the firm’s reputation.”

Fernheim whispered, “Karl Neiss alive?”

“Alive,” repeated Steiner.

“Have the dead revived already, then? I myself, everybody with me — we all saw him disappear beneath a landslide and I never heard of his having been pulled out of the debris. Hans, my dear fellow, you are joking with me. And even if they did get to him, he couldn’t possibly have come out alive. Tell me, Hans, what led you to say such a thing? Didn’t—”

“Story-telling is not my business,” clipped Steiner, “but I’ll tell you this: Karl is alive and well, alive and well. And, let me add, Inge is counting on you, on your not setting yourself as a barrier between them. And as to your coming back empty-handed, we’ve taken that into consideration; we won’t send you away empty-handed. I haven’t as yet set aside a definite sum for you, but at any rate you can be sure it will be enough to set you on your feet, unless you mean to go idle.”

“Won’t you let me see Inge?” pleaded Fernheim.

“If Inge wants to see you,” said Steiner, “we won’t stand in her way.”

“Where is she?”

“If she hasn’t gone out for a walk, she’s sitting in her room.”

“By herself?” asked Fernheim derisively.

Steiner did not catch Fernheim’s derision and answered calmly, “She may or may not be by herself. Inge is on her own and may do as she pleases. At any rate, she can be asked if she is free to receive visitors. What do you think, Gertrude? Shall we send Zig to her? What was wrong with Zig that he was acting so stubbornly? Doing nothing is good for no one, especially children.”

4

Inge greeted Fernheim politely. If we did not know what we do know, we would think that she was glad to see him. A new light, a deep contentment shone from her eyes. Happiness is a wonderful thing: even when it is not intended for you, you bask in its light. At that moment, all that he had to say fled him. He sat looking at Inge in silence.

“Where were you all these years?” she asked. “That I know perfectly well,” said Werner, “but were you to ask me where I am now, I doubt that I could answer.” Inge smiled as though she had heard a joke.

Werner moved uncomfortably in his chair. He leaned his right hand on the arm of the chair, lifted his left hand to his nose, smelled his fingernails, yellowed from smoking, amazed all the while that after all the years that he had been away from Inge he was once more sitting beside her, even looking at her while she looked at him — but not one of the thoughts that filled his heart reached his lips, even though his heart urged him to say something.

“Tell me,” said Inge, “I’m listening.”

Werner stuck his hand into his pocket and started groping about. But the present he had bought for Inge had been pawned for travel expenses to Lückenbach. He smiled painfully and said, “You want to know what I did all that while?”

She nodded her head. “Why not?”

As soon as he started speaking he saw that she was not listening.

“And how did the Bulgarians treat you?” asked Inge.

“The Bulgarians? The Bulgarians were our allies.”

“But weren’t you a prisoner of war? I thought I heard that you had been captured.”

“I was a prisoner of war of the Serbs,” Fernheim answered. “You fail to distinguish between friend and foe. I heard he came back.”

Her face reddened and she did not reply.

“You suspect me of having purposely deceived you when I came and told you that I saw Karl Neiss buried in a landslide. I was ready to tell a hundred lies in order to win you. But that was true.”

“True and not true.”

“True and not true? What’s not true about it?”

“It’s true that a landslide fell on top of him, but it didn’t bury him.”

“Then where was he all those years?”

“That’s a long story.”

“You’re afraid to tell me,” said Werner, “for fear I’ll stay here with you that much longer.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“But rather—”

“Rather — I don’t know how to tell stories.”

“At any rate,” said Werner, “I’d like to know what happened and what didn’t happen. With my own eyes I saw a landslide bury him, and you say there was a landslide, but not on him. Forgive me if I repeat myself, but where was he, then, all those years? He wrote no letters, he wasn’t inscribed among the living. Suddenly he comes and says, ‘Lo and behold, here I am, and now, now all we need to do is pluck Werner Fernheim out of the world and take his wife.’ Right, Inge?”

“Please don’t, Werner.”

“Or it would be better were this same Werner, this same Werner Fernheim, Inge’s husband, to pluck himself out of the world, so that Mr. Karl Neis might take to wife Mrs. Inge Fernheim, excuse me, Miss Ingeborg of the house of Starkmat. This is the woman Werner took in holy matrimony, who even bore him a child, and though God did take him, his father is still alive, and means to go on living; yes, to go on living after all the years he was half dead. But this same Werner Femheim, this unlucky fellow, doesn’t want to pluck himself out of the world. To the contrary, he seeks new life. Yesterday I was at our son’s grave. Do you think that with him we buried everything that was between us? Don’t cry, it’s not tears I’m after.”

Suddenly he changed his tone. “I didn’t come to force myself on you against your will. Even the lowest of the low isn’t utterly lacking in honor. But you do understand, don’t you? I had to see you, I have to speak to you; but if you don’t want me to, I’ll go. And maybe the future will be brighter for me than Mr. Hans Steiner and Miss Ingeborg of the house of Starkmat think. My black fate isn’t sealed forever. Not yet. Tell me, Inge, is he here? Don’t be afraid of me, I don’t want to do anything to him. What could I do, if even mountains make a fool of me?”

Inge sat silently sorrowful. Werner looked at her two or three times. Since he had last seen her she had put on a little weight. Or maybe she looked that way because she was wearing black. The black skirt she had on went with her slender figure and her shiny blonde hair. The white of her neck shone, but the radiance that had beamed from her eyes had dimmed. Fernheim knew that this happiness had not come on his account, on his returning from the prison camp; no, her happiness had been held in readiness for the coming of Karl Neiss. And even though at first he had been saddened by the cause, her happiness had made him happy. Now that all happiness had left her, he was overwhelmed with pity for her.

Again he looked at her. She sat hunched over, her face in her hands, wet with tears. Suddenly she shook herself in alarm, as if a hand had touched her shoulder. She extended her hands as if to defend herself and looked at him angrily.

“Well, now I’ll leave,” he said.

“Goodbye, Werner.”

He returned. “You won’t give me your hand?”

She gave him her hand in farewell. Clasping it, he said, “Before I leave, I want to tell you something.”

She removed her hand and shook her shoulders in refusal.

“Still, maybe it would be worth your while to listen. And if not for the sake of the Werner standing here as an uninvited guest, then for the sake of that Werner who was lucky enough to stand under the wedding canopy with Ingeborg. But if you refuse, I won’t impose upon you. And now—”

“And now, goodbye,” said Inge.

“So be it. Goodbye, Ingeborg, goodbye.”

Seeing her turn to go, he stood up.

She stared at him, wondering why he was not leaving.

“At any rate,” said Werner, “it’s rather strange that you don’t want to hear a little of what I went through.”

“Haven’t you told me?”

“When I started to tell you, your ears were already in another place.”

“My ears were in their proper place, but you didn’t say a thing. Really, I don’t recall that you said a thing.”

“Would you like me to tell you?” asked Werner.

“You must have told Hans or Gertrude or both of them,” she replied.

“And if I did?”

“If you did, they’ll tell me.”

“If I understand what you’re really getting at,” said Werner, “you don’t want to hear it.”

“Why do you say that? I expressly said that Gertrude or Hans would tell me, so I do want to hear it.”

“And if I myself were to tell you?”

“What time is it?” said Inge.

Werner smiled. “So goes the proverb doesn’t it? Dem Glücklichen schlägt keine Stunde: the happy person is beyond time.”

“I don’t know what answer to give to that sort of question,” said Inge.

“And are you ready to answer other questions?” he countered.

“That depends on your questions. But now my head aches and I can’t keep talking on and on, and anyway—”

“Anyway what?”

“You have a strange way of latching on to every word,” said Inge.

“Does it seem strange to you that after all the years I haven’t seen you I’m drawn by what you say?”

Inge clutched her temples. “My head, my head! Don’t be difficult, Werner, if I ask you to leave me alone.”

“I’m already leaving,” he said. “Are you looking at my shoes? They’re old, but easy on the feet. You’re quite a la mode, though; you’ve even cut your hair. I can’t say it’s unattractive, but when you had all your hair it was prettier. When did the baby die? I was at his grave and I saw his stone, but I forget the date. Are you crying? My heart cries too, inside of me, but I get hold of myself. If you look at my eyes you won’t find even a trace of a tear. Tell the fellow who’s knocking at the door you can’t get up and open it for him because of your headache. Zigi, are you here? What do you have to say, Zigi? Come here, sweetheart, let’s make up. What’s this in your hand, a letter? You’re a mailman, are you, my dear nephew?”

Zigi gave a note to his aunt and left.

Inge took the note while looking at Werner with a furrowed brow, trying her best to understand why on earth the man would not go away. He should have left long since.

After a while she stopped thinking about him and began saying to herself, I have to leave, I simply must leave, it’s impossible for me not to leave, every wasted minute is precious.

Her mind came back to Fernheim. Can’t he see that I have to go? She looked at him and said, “Excuse me, Werner, but I’m wanted and I have to go.”

“How do you know you’re wanted? The note is still folded in your hand and you haven’t looked at it.”

Inge dropped her shoulders. It seemed that she abrogated her will before his, and that it did not matter whether she went or stayed. Her eyes were extinguished, as it were, and her lids fell down over them.

“Are you tired?” Werner whispered.

Inge opened her eyes. “I’m not tired,” she replied.

A new spirit clothed Werner. “Good, good,” he said, “it’s good that you’re not tired and we can sit and talk with each other. You can’t imagine how I’ve longed for this moment when I should see you. Had it not been for this hope, I would have died long since. Now I see that all that longing is nothing compared to this moment when you and I are seated here together as one. I have no words to express it, but I think you read some of it in my face. You see, my darling, how my knees bend of themselves and kneel before you. So did they bend whenever I thought of you. How lucky I am to be with you once again under the same roof. I’m not an eloquent man, but I tell you this: From the moment that I stepped over the threshold of your room, my soul was stirred as on that day when you placed your hand in mine and agreed to become my wife. Do you remember that moment, when you rested your head on my shoulder while we sat together as one, your hand in mine? Your eyes were closed, as were mine, as I close them now and pass before me all the events of that matchless day. Throwaway the note, Inge, and give me your hand. My eyes are closed, but my heart sees how good you are, how good you are to me.”

Inge shrugged her shoulders and left.

Fernheim opened his eyes. “Inge!” he cried.

But Inge had vanished. Fernheim was alone. What now? he thought. Now I have no choice but to leave this place. That’s clear; but everything else is “something else again,” as my worthy brother-in-law would put it.

His mind was already vacant of thought, and his former tension began to dissolve. But his toes were burning and the soles of his feet as well. It seemed that the shoes he had said were comfortable were not so comfortable after all.

He put his hand into his pocket and took out his ticket: one half had allowed him to visit his wife and the other half would allow him to return. Holding the ticket in his hand he thought, Now I’ll go to the railroad station and leave. And if I’ve missed the afternoon train I’ll take the evening train. Not only the happy ones stand beyond time, but the unfortunate, too. All times are ripe for misfortune.

For a little while he stood in the room that Inge had left. Then he turned around and went to the door. He looked about the room, walked out, and shut the door.

The Night

When night fell I went home; that is, I went to the hotel room I had taken for my wife and myself. I was hurrying, as I knew that my wife was tired out by all the travel and wanted to sleep, and I had no intention of disturbing her.

There was a multitude of people in the streets, mainly new immigrants, who were arriving here from all over the world. For many years they had wasted away in the death camps, or wandered aimlessly over hill and valley, and through forests, all this time without seeing so much as the flicker of a candle, and now that they’d stepped from the dark into this sudden brightness, they seemed puzzled and somewhat suspicious, not being able to grasp whether all the lights had been left burning by an oversight, or whether it was part of some scheme of the authorities.

An old man came toward me, wearing a greenish coat that came down to his knees, exactly like the coat Mr. Halbfried, the bookseller in our town, used to wear for as long as I remember. The coat had lost most of its color, but had kept its original shape. Short coats are better at keeping their shape than long ones, because long coats sweep the ground and get frayed, whereas short coats flutter in the air, and the ground cannot harm them in any way. Even though their appearance might have changed, their hems remain as the tailor finished them and seem to have retained their perfection.

While I was wondering whether this was really Mr. Halbfried, he ran his weary eyes over me and said: “From the day that I arrived here I’ve been looking for you, and now that we’ve met I’m happy twice over, once because I’ve found someone from my home town, and twice because that someone happens to be you.” The old man was so excited that he forgot to greet me properly, instead of which he straightway reeled off a string of names, people he’d asked about me, and after each name he’d express his amazement that So-and-so didn’t know me, and had he himself failed to recognize me the moment he saw me, he could have passed me as if we were not fellow townsmen. Having come around to mentioning our town, he began talking about the past, the time when we were neighbors, and his bookstore was filled with books that united all the learned people of the town, who were passing in and out of the shop all day, and having heated discussions about what was going on in the world, and about the future, and coming to the conclusion that the world was evolving into a better place, and there was I, a small boy, fingering the books, climbing the ladder, standing at the top reading, not realizing that I was endangering myself; for had someone blundered into the ladder by mistake, I could very easily have fallen off. But as if the large stock of books which he kept were not sufficient for me, I had asked him to get me The Poem of Jerusalem Liberated. However, he couldn’t remember any more whether he’d placed the order before I emigrated to the Land of Israel, or whether I did so before he’d placed the order.

Another thing he was reminded of, said Mr. Halbfried, was the time they showed my first poems to that old mystic who had written two interpretations of the prayerbook, and the old man had looked at them and murmured, “Kehadin kamtza dilevushe mine uve” [“like the snail whose garb is a part of it”], and the learned listeners tried hard to understand the meaning of these words, and did not succeed. He, Mr. Halbfried continued, was still puzzled that they never took the trouble to look them up in a dictionary, and that he himself did not do so, although he had a number of dictionaries in stock, and could have done so quite easily, yet somehow never did.

He broke off his story and asked me was I angry with his brother? — Why? His brother had just passed us and greeted me, and I made as if I didn’t see him.

Mr. Halbfried’s last words shocked and saddened me. I had not noticed anyone greeting me; as for the man who had passed us, I was under the impression that it was Mr. Halbfried himself. As I didn’t wish him to think that I would turn my eyes away from people who greet me, I said to him: “I swear I didn’t notice your brother; had I noticed him, I would have been the first to greet him.” So Mr. Halbfried began talking once more of the good old days, of his bookshop and the people who came to it. Every time Mr. Halbfried mentioned a name, he did so with great warmth, the way we used to talk about good friends in those long-lost days before the war.

After a while, Mr. Halbfried stopped and said: “I shall leave you now, as I do not want you to keep a man waiting who wishes to see you.” With that he shook my hand and went away.

The man Mr. Halbfried had mentioned was not known to me, nor did he seem to be waiting for me; however, Mr. Halbfried’s mistake came in handy, as it enabled me to shake the old man off politely, and so avoid disturbing my wife’s sleep.

But Mr. Halbfried had not been mistaken; after I’d gotten rid of him, this man barred my way, then poked his stick into the ground and leaned on it with both hands, while looking at me. Then he lifted his hand in greeting, lifted it to his cap, a round cap of sheepskin leather, and while he was doing so, he said: “Don’t you know me?” I said to myself: Why tell him I don’t know him? So I gave him a warm look and said: “Certainly I know you, you’re none other than—” He interrupted me and said: “I was sure you’d know me, if not for my own sake, then for the sake of my son. What do you think of his poems?” From this I realized that he was the father of someone or other who had sent me his book of poems. I said to myself: Why tell him that I haven’t looked at them yet? So I gave him a warm look and said whatever it is one says on these occasions. Yet he didn’t seem satisfied with it. So I said to myself: Why not add a few nice words? So I added a few compliments; but he was still unsatisfied, and began singing his son’s praises himself, and I kept nodding my head in agreement, so that an onlooker would have thought that the praise came from my mouth.

Having done, he said: “No doubt you wish to make my son’s acquaintance, so go to the concert hall, that’s where you’ll find him. My son is a well-loved man, all the doors are open to him, not only the doors of music but the doors of all the important houses in town. Why, if my son desired, let’s say, to ride on a mouse, why, the animal would rush up to him with its tail between its legs and beg him to take a ride. Truly, I myself would love to go to that concert, all the best members of our intelligentsia will be there, the trouble is they won’t let you in if you haven’t got a ticket.” Saying this, he rubbed two fingers together and made a noise with his lips, as if to say, you need real coins for that.

I kept quiet and did not say a word. It was some years now that I hadn’t gone to a concert. I could never understand how a crowd of people could assemble at a fixed date and hour, in a special hall, just to hear some singing. Nor could I understand how it was that the singers were ready to lift up their voices in song at the exact hour the ticket holders were filling the hall, ready to listen.

I’m just a small-town boy; I can grasp that someone is singing because his heart is full; but this singing in front of an audience rich enough to buy tickets, because some impresario organized it all, was beyond me. So when I saw how much this man wanted to go to the concert, I asked myself whether I should help him, and decided to buy him a ticket. He saw what I was thinking, and said, “I won’t go without you.” I asked myself whether to go with him, and then I said, “All right, I’ll buy two tickets, and we’ll go together.” He started feeling the air, as if it were full of tickets. Again he rubbed two fingers together, and made a popping noise, like a cork coming out of a bottle.

So we walked together, and he kept praising the concert hall, where there was so much music one could almost drown in it. Then he told me about this violinist whose violin was so precious that even the case he carried it in was worth more than the instruments of other violinists. Then he returned to his son, to whom poetical rhymes came for the sole purpose of the matching of words. Then he returned to the subject of the tickets, out of respect for which the doors used to open themselves. Suddenly he began worrying, as it occurred to him that he could be wasting his time, for, although I seemed willing enough to buy him a ticket, what if every seat was sold out, or supposing there was only one single ticket left wouldn’t I buy it for myself, and leave him standing outside. Thus we came to my hotel.

I said to him: “Wait here, I’m going in to change, and then we’re off to the concert.” He poked his stick into the ground, leaned on it with both hands, and stood there.

I left him outside and told the doorman I wanted two tickets for the concert. The doorman said: “I have two good tickets, which were ordered by the Duke of Ilivio, but he left them with me, as he cannot come since he has been called to the Emperor.” Here the doorman whispered to me that the Emperor had arrived secretly in town, with most of his retinue, dukes, lords, and officers, and that some of them were actually staying at our hotel.

I took the tickets and went up to my room, leaving the door open so that I could change by the light in the corridor, and not have to turn on the light in the room, which would have awakened my wife. I walked in on tiptoe, noiselessly, and to my surprise and distress I found a strange man in the room. Who was that who dared to enter my room in the dark of the night? Should the earth refuse to open at his feet and swallow him, then I would be forced to throw him out myself, and not too politely, either.

As I approached him, I saw that it was Moshele, a relative of mine. This Moshele and I had grown up together, and we went through difficult times together, until one day he was caned up into the army, where he stayed until he was wounded and dismissed. We thought that he had been burned in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, but here he stood, alive, in my room.

I said, “What brought you here?” He said, “My troubles brought me here. I have been shuffling from one mound of refuse to another without a roof over my head, and when I heard you were here I came running, for I was sure that you would put me up.”

I said to him: “Do I have a home that you should ask to sleep here? As you can see, I’m myself but a guest for the night.”

He said: “All I’m asking is a place on the floor.”

I began laughing. A hotel where dukes and lords live, and he wants to sleep on the floor.

I don’t know if his brain succeeded in grasping what I meant and if his heart accepted my words. In any case, he got up and left.

I went to the window to watch him go, and I saw him in the street, cowering as he was hit by the whips of the coachmen who drove the coaches of the nobility. I called to him, but he didn’t answer me; I called to him again and he didn’t answer, probably being too busy trying to evade the whips to hear my voice. I decided to call louder, but then I remembered that my wife was sleeping, so I didn’t. And it is probably just as well, for, had I shouted, all the other coachmen would have seen him too, and joined in beating him.

I looked after Moshele until he disappeared from view. Then I went to the wardrobe to change. Two small children came in and started walking around me in circles. As I opened the door of the wardrobe to take some clothes, one of them jumped in, and his brother jumped after him, and they shut the wardrobe door behind them. I was somewhat perplexed; as they were probably the sons of a duke or a lord, I couldn’t very well be rude to them. On the other hand, I couldn’t let them go on playing, as they were liable to wake my wife.

Their governess came and helped me out of this trouble. She said to them: “If I may be so bold as to say, it behooves not the princes to enter the room of a strange person.”

I apologized to the governess for having left the door of my room open and caused the two king’s sons to enter my room. I added that I was going to the concert and had only come to dress.

The governess examined my clothes with her eyes and said: “You can’t show yourself in that collar you’re wearing.” I said to her: “Yes, you’re quite right.” She said: “Surely, you can find another collar.” “Probably,” I said. She said: “Go on, put it on.” I said to her: “I am afraid that when the king’s son did me the honor of jumping into my wardrobe, he trampled on my collars, and they got soiled.” She said: “In that case, I’ll tie your tie. Your gracious highnesses, would you be so kind as to leave the room until I finish tying the tie of this gentleman, who is the brother of your teacher.” The little boys stood there and looked very surprised that this creature, which had been created to serve them, should now wish to serve a simple mortal.

The graciousness of the young lady and the envy of the king’s sons put me into a much better mood. I stuttered somewhat and said: “It is not my custom to go to concerts, but what is a custom worth if you’re not ready to disregard it for the sake of another person.” The young lady didn’t pay much attention to my words; she was too busy tying and then untying every knot she tied, saying, “It wasn’t such a knot I meant to tie, now I shall tie one that is much handsomer.” Finally, she stroked my arm and said: “Look in the mirror and see how beautifully tied your tie is.” I said to her: “I cannot look in the mirror.” “Why?” “Because the mirror is screwed onto the inside of the wardrobe door, and if I opened it wide it would squeak and wake my wife.” “Your wife?” screamed the young lady in a rage. “And here you were talking to me as if we were alone in the room. If your wife is here, then go and be happy with her.” With that the young lady went away.

“Who were you talking to,” asked my wife. I said to her: “No one.” She said: “I must have been dreaming.” I said to her: “Dream or not, I’m going out for a walk, and won’t be back till after midnight.”

I went looking for the man who was waiting for me in front of the hotel, but he was nowhere to be seen. I asked the doorman about him; he answered: “Some time ago I did see a person loitering in front of the hotel. Had I known he was a friend of yours, sir, I would have looked at him more carefully.” I said to the doorman: “Where could he be now?” “Where? I really don’t know.” “Which way did he go?” “Well,” said the doorman, “I seem to remember that he turned right, or maybe it was left, people like these have round shoulders and one never knows quite which way they turn.” I gave him a tip. He bowed low and said: “If your excellency would care to listen to my advice, he would visit the servants’ quarters in the hotel, as the serfs of the nobles have brought a Jewish clown with them, and it is quite possible that the man your excellency is looking for has gone there to see the fun.”

I went to the servants’ quarters of the hotel, and saw the serfs sitting like masters, their bellies shaking with laughter, and a small man, shrunken and beautiful, standing on the big stage doing tricks, and talking all the while. When the tricks were funny, his voice was sad, and when they were sad, his voice was funny. I wondered whether he did it on purpose. It seemed to me to be great art, being funny in a sad voice, and being sad in a funny voice. I looked around and found the man I was searching for. I waved the two tickets at him, but he pretended not to see me, and left. It seemed as if his leaving were only temporary, because of me, that is, and he was likely to return as soon as I had gone.

Another man came up to me; he had a long face and a cheerful beard. He stroked his beard and said: “Who are you looking for?” I told him. He said: “I could manage to go with you to the concert.” I threw a look at him and shouted in amazement: “What! You?” He shook his beard and said: “Why not?” I repeated what I had said before, only with a great deal of sarcasm: “What! You?” He disappeared, and so did his beard. “What do we do now?” I thought to myself. I waved the tickets in the air, but nothing happened. The man I was waving at didn’t show up. So I said to myself: Not only can’t I give him the pleasure of a concert, I’m even preventing him from the pleasure of seeing the clown, as he won’t show his face in the audience as long as I’m here. I got up and left.

As this man didn’t wish to come, I gave up the idea of going to the concert; but, having told my wife that I wouldn’t be in before midnight, not until the singer had finished his recital, I had time to take a walk. I began thinking about what had happened, about these incidents which seemed to grow each out of the other, and yet there was no connection between them. I started from the beginning, from the ladder in the bookstore, The Poem of Jerusalem Liberated, and that small creature whose garb is a part of him.

After skipping over some matters, I got to thinking of Moshele, my own flesh and blood, who had escaped the fires of cremation and now was shuffling from one mound of refuse to another. As the concert had not yet come to an end and it was not yet time for me to return to my room, I was able to think a great many thoughts. As I strolled along I thought: If only I could find Moshele now that I am just strolling and have nothing else to do, I would talk to him and let him tell me all his troubles; I would appease him and bring him to the inn, give him food and drink and order a soft, warm bed, and we would part from each other with a hearty goodnight. As I was strolling and thinking such thoughts, it suddenly dawned on me that there could be nothing finer. But favors do not come at all times, or to anyone. Moshele had been saved from cremation, and as an added favor it had been given him to find his own flesh and blood. Whereas I, who was his flesh and blood — no favors at all were granted to me, and I couldn’t find Moshele again.

Finally, the singer ended his song and the audience went home. I too returned to the room at the hotel and closed the door behind me carefully, as an open door calls to uninvited guests. But there are guests who come no matter how tightly one’s door is shut, as they are the thoughts surrounding our actions. So many guests came that the air in the room got fouler and fouler, and I was afraid I was going to choke. I then untied the knot which the young lady had made in my tie, and that helped a little. Now there was more air to breathe, and the guests brought some more guests, and very soon I was choking again.

First Kiss

Friday afternoon; Sabbath eve. Father was out of town on business and had left me alone, like a kind of watchman, to take care of the store. Dusk. Time to lock up, I said to myself, time to go home and change my clothes. Time to go to the House of Prayer.

I took down the keys from where we keep them hidden, but as I went outside to lock the door, three monks appeared. They were bareheaded and wore heavy, dark robes and sandals on their feet. “We want to talk with you,” they said.

I thought to myself, If they’ve come to do business, Friday afternoon close to sunset is no time to do business; and if they’ve come to have a talk, I’m not the man for them. But they saw that I was hesitant to reply, and they smiled.

“Don’t be afraid,” one of them said, “we’re not about to delay you from your prayers.”

“Look to the heavens and see,” added the second. “The sun has yet to go down, we still have time.”

The third one nodded his head, and in the same words, or in different words, repeated what the first two had already said. I locked the door and walked along with them. It so happened that we came out opposite my house. One of the monks raised his left hand.

“Isn’t this your house?”

“This is his house,” answered the second.

“Of course it’s his house,” added the third. “This is his house.” And he pointed three fingers at Father’s house.

“If you’d like, we can go in,” I said.

They nodded their heads: “By your leave.”

We made a circuit of the entire street and walked down a short incline that took us below street level. I forgot to say that there are two entrances to Father’s house, one onto the street, where his shop is, and another onto an alleyway, opposite his House of Study. Both entrances are kept open on weekdays, but at dusk on Friday afternoon we close the door that gives onto the street and unlock the one to the House of Study.

I pushed open the door and we went in. I brought them into the parlor. They sat on chairs that in preparation for the Sabbath meal had been arranged around a table set for the Sabbath. Their robes dragged behind their sandals over the special rug that Mother lays out in honor of the Sabbath.

The eldest of the three, who sat at the head of the table, was fat and fleshy. The others sat on either side of him: one was long and thin, with pale hair and a small wound that glowed red on the back of his head where the monks leave a round spot without hair. The other had no distinguishing marks except for a large Adam’s apple. Myself — I didn’t sit down, but remained standing, as is only reasonable for a man who is in a hurry but has had to receive guests.

They began to talk; I kept quiet. When they saw the two candlesticks on the table they said, “There are three of you, aren’t there? There’s you, your father, and your mother. Why doesn’t your mother light a third candle for her son?”

“Mother is simply continuing a custom she began on the first Sabbath after her marriage,” I told them, “which is to light two candles only.”

They started discussing the various regulations that pertain to the ritual of candle-lighting, and what each one of them means.

“No,” I broke in, “it’s not for any of the reasons you’ve mentioned, it’s just that one candle is for the Written Law and one is for the Oral Law. And the two are actually one, which is why we refer to the Sabbath candles in the singular. But, anyway, I see you’re all quite expert in Jewish custom.”

They smiled, but the smile disappeared into the wrinkles in their faces.

“Well, and why shouldn’t we be experts in Jewish custom,” said the one that I’ve been calling the third. “After all, we belong to the order of—”

I thought he said they were Dominicans; but outside the monastery Dominicans don’t usually wear their habits, and these three had their habits on. So he must have named a different order, but his Adam’s apple got in the way and I didn’t catch what he said.

The conversation was preventing me from keeping track of time, and I forgot that a man has to make himself ready to greet the Sabbath. I asked the maid to serve refreshments. She brought in the special delicacies that we prepare in honor of the Sabbath. I put a flask of brandy in front of them. They ate and drank and talked. Since I was agitated about the time, I didn’t hear anything they said.

Two or three times it occurred to me that the hour had come to welcome the Sabbath. But when I looked out the window, the sun was in the same place it had been when the monks first accosted me. Now you can’t say there was some kind of black magic here, because I had mentioned the name of God any number of times during the conversation; and you can’t say that I’d made a simple mistake in time, because the sexton had not yet called for prayers. The whole thing was quite astonishing: when the monks first came, the sun was close to setting, and all this time they’d been eating and drinking and talking, yet the sun was precisely where I’d last seen it before they ever appeared. And it’s even harder, for that matter, to explain away the problem of our clock, because even if you claim that I was so preoccupied with my guests I didn’t think to set it for the Sabbath, all the same I assure you it’s a fine instrument, and would keep proper time even without a daily winding.

Mother came in to light the candles. The monks stood up, and in the selfsame movement walked out.

I got up to accompany them. In the street, one of them shoved me aside.

I was stunned. After all the honor I’d shown him, to be treated like that — while the other two, who saw him push me, didn’t even bother to rebuke him.

I didn’t want Mother to notice that something had happened to me, so I decided not to return home. And I didn’t go to the House of Prayer, because, by the time I could have washed myself from the touch of the monk’s hand, they would have already finished the prayers. I stood there like a man with nothing to do, neither here nor there.

Two young novices came along.

“Where did the Fathers go,” they said.

I was dumbfounded by what I heard. Men like that they call Father. Before I could rouse myself to answer, one of the novices disappeared. Vanished, right before my eyes. He left the other one behind.

I just stood there, shocked and speechless. For a while it was as if no one else existed. Then I glanced at him and saw that he was very young, about the height of a small youth, with black eyes. If it hadn’t been for the commandment that tells us not to show them grace, which also means not to impute grace to them, I would even have said that his eyes were graceful, and sweet. His face was quite smooth, without the slightest trace of a beard. He had the kind of beauty you used to be able to see in every Jewish town, the beauty of young Jewish boys who have never tasted the taste of sin. And beyond that there was something else about him that imparted all the more grace to his graceful features.

I began talking with him so that I could examine him more closely. As I talked, I laid my hand on his shoulder and I said to him, “Listen my brother, aren’t you a Jew?”

I felt his shoulders tremble beneath my hand; I felt his eyes tremble; he lowered his head on his chest and I felt his heart tremble.

“Tell me,” I repeated my question, “aren’t you a Jew?”

He raised his head from his heart: “I am a Jew.”

I said to him, “If you’re a Jew, what are you doing with them?”

He bowed his head.

“Who are you,” I said, “and where are you from?”

He stood in silence before me.

I brought my face close to his, as if to transfer my sense of hearing to my mouth.

He lifted his head, and I could see how his heart was shuddering, and my heart too began to shudder. I felt his black, sweet eyes upon me. He looked at me with such loving grace, with such tender faith, such glorious kindness, and above all with such grief — like a man trying to control himself before he finally reveals a long-kept secret.

I said to myself, What is all this?

As much time went by as went by, and still he said nothing.

“Is it so hard for you to tell me where you’re from?”

He whispered the name of a city.

I said, “If I heard you correctly you’re from the town of Likovitz.”

He nodded his head.

“If you’re from Likovitz,” I said, “then you must certainly know the Tzaddik of Likovitz, I was in his House of Prayer once on New Year’s Day, and the Tzaddik himself led the prayers. Let me tell you, when he came to the verse ‘And all shall come to serve Thee,’ I imagined that I heard the approaching footsteps of all the nations of the world who fail to recognize the people of Israel or their Father in Heaven.

And when he sang ‘And the wayward shall learn understanding,’ I imagined they were all bowing down as one to worship the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel…. My brother, are you in pain?”

He shook with sobs.

“What are you crying about?”

Tears flooded his eyes. He wiped them away. Still weeping, he said, “I am his daughter. His youngest daughter. The daughter of his old age.”

My heart thundered and my mouth fastened to hers, and her mouth to mine. And the purest sweetness flowed from her mouth to mine and — it is possible — from my mouth to hers. We call this in Hebrew “the kiss of the mouth,” and it must be the same in other languages too. I should say here that this was the first time I ever kissed a young girl, and it seems almost certain to me that it was her first kiss as well: a kiss of innocence that carries with it no pain, but goodness and blessing, life, grace, and kindness, whereby a man and a woman live together till calm old age.