Mr. Mani

The Conversation Partners

DR. EFRAYIM SHAPIRO a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor, born in 1870 on the estate of his parents, Sholom and Sarah (née Pomerantz) Shapiro. Until the age of ten, Efrayim was taught Jewish subjects and a bit of arithmetic by private tutors; subsequently, he continued his education at a small Jewish school in a nearby town. Despite his humanistic tendencies, his parents convinced him to study medicine and helped arrange his enrollment at the famous Jagellonica University in nearby Cracow, where — although he showed little enthusiasm for his studies and was considered no more than a mediocre student — he finished the seven years of medical school. All of his vacations, no matter how brief, were spent on his parents’ estate.

In 1895 Efrayim Shapiro received his license to practice general medicine. Since he wished to live with his family, he declined an offer to acquire a specialization while interning in a Cracow hospital and chose to open a pediatric practice in his native district.

Efrayim was a tall, slender young man with the perpetual hint of an ironic smile on his face and a melancholic disposition. He was not particularly attached to the local Jewish community and attended synagogue only on the High Holy Days. Much to the displeasure of his parents (who had put a wing of their house at his disposal, in which he maintained his small clinic), he liked to spend his evenings in long conversations with the Polish servants, sometimes joined by his younger sister Linka.

In 1898 Efrayim’s father, Sholom Shapiro, traveled to Basel to attend the Second Zionist Congress. He returned brimming with impressions and experiences and firmly committed to the new movement, for which he helped organize Zionist soirees that he went to with Linka, since his wife Sarah’s health did not permit her to travel. In 1899 Sholom Shapiro planned to attend the Third Zionist Congress as the official delegate of his district; at the last minute, however, he had to cancel his participation as a result of his wife’s poor health and to send Linka and Efrayim in his place. When the Congress was over, the two of them decided to forego a planned two-week vacation at a Jewish boardinghouse in Lugano and to visit Palestine instead. They ^returned home to Jelleny-Szad two months after leaving it.

SHOLOM SHAPIRO was born in Vilna, in Lithuania, in 1848 to an extremely poor family. He studied in a heder and a yeshiva and was an outstanding pupil, but his family’s economic hardship forced him to stop his schooling without obtaining his rabbinical degree and to find work tutoring arithmetic and religious subjects in wealthy Jewish homes in the province of Pinsk. From there he wandered westward to Galicia, where in 1867 he was hired by Meir Pomerantz, the owner of a large flour mill in Jelleny-Szad, to tutor his daughter Sarah, who was three years older than Sholom. The two were married in 1869, when Sholom was twenty-one, and their eldest son Efrayim was born in 1870. The birth left Sarah confined for a long period and her recovery from it was slow. Meanwhile her father died, and Sholom Shapiro took over his father-in-law’s mill. He proved to be a gifted and resourceful businessman who within a few years expanded the family’s holdings, buying up more mills and acquiring the lumbering rights to several local forests while maintaining a reputation for fairness and reliability throughout the area. Although his son Efrayim was a joy to both parents, Sarah’s ill health kept her from having more children. Nevertheless, the Shapiros persisted, and in 1879, when Efrayim was nine, their daughter Linka was born. Yet although the family’s happiness was now complete, the birth damaged Sarah’s frail constitution even more.

From its inception in 1897, Sholom Shapiro was greatly interested in the new movement of political Zionism. He attended the 1898 Zionist Congress in Basel and was highly excited by the debates and new ideas he heard there. He also had the experience of being introduced to the Zionist leader Dr. Herzl and of chatting with him briefly in German. Shapiro planned to attend the 1899 congress as well, but had to ask his son Efrayim to take his place. Besides wishing him to see for himself what Zionism was, Sholom Shapiro secretly hoped that Efrayim might meet a nice Jewish girl at the congress, since he was increasingly troubled both by his son’s bachelorhood and by his avoidance of Jewish circles. Linka, who was twenty at the time and an ardent Zionist in her own right, pleaded to be allowed to go along. At first her parents had grave doubts about the matter, but at Efrayim’s repeated urgings they agreed.

Sholom Shapiro’s half of the conversation is missing.

— Over here, Father.

— Here… behind the commode, next to the sofa…

— No… just idling away the time… I was having myself a smoke…

— Hiding? What for?

— Ah… perhaps so… hiding, eh? I rather like that…

— No. I am not tired. It is agreeable here in the dark. The forest — the croaking of the frogs — how dear our native land is! And meanwhile winter has set in with a vengeance. I declare, you haven’t left a leaf on the trees…

— I have had quite enough to eat.

— No, Father. I am absolutely sated — and besides, Stefa has brought me a samovar and some cakes. You should see how she cried and crossed herself and shook all over at the sight of me! And how she bent to kiss my hand… what on earth, my dears, were you so worried about?

— My word! Is it that, then?

— So that’s it! It had not occurred to me.

— That is certainly so… I can’t deny that they have a claim on it too…

— Well, Father, I simply had no idea what the great fuss was all about. Mrazhik actually went down on his knees, doffed his cap, carried Linka in his arms from the railway car to the carriage, and covered us with wraps like royalty…

— Church bells?

— So I do… what a simpleton I am, dearest Papa! And here I was convinced that it was a sign of how much they missed us… of how much they loved us…

— No doubt. But not enough to make them carry on in such a fashion.

— Lights in the village? Why, so there are…

— My word… I declare…

— Of course. It is their Holy Land too — there is no denying that — you don’t know how right you are! Jerusalem and all the rest of it… I am quite willing to grant them their fair share of it… but still — such excitement — why, they even tried kissing the tails of my coat…

— No, Papa, I don’t feel the slightest fatigue anymore. It has dissolved quite away in this damp clime of ours, this swamp air… How cozy it is by the fire! The trains are not heated, you know; the people on them are supposed to warm each other, but you have to expend a great deal of warmth before you get any back… which is why this undemanding fire is so wonderful — the whole last leg of our trip I kept myself going by imagining coming home to it — you are looking at a happy man…

— Yes, happy. When the train pulled out of Cracow, and I knew that we would soon be home, and the sun began to dip through the branches, and the fields stretched away to the horizon beyond the railroad tracks that converged from all directions, and I saw the wooden sign of our village pointing toward the black waters of the Vistula… upon my soul, I felt as if I had emerged from a dark tunnel into freedom, as if I had returned from a journey through the earth…

— Through the earth… I remember that when we were children, after Grandfather passed away, you once told us a story about the dead… about how, at the End of Days, at the Resurrection, the Christians would rise from their graves where they were, but we Jews would crawl through underground caverns and come out in the Land of Israel… which is just what I’ve been doing these past few days, but in the opposite direction — from there to here — cavern-crawling and turning over in many graves — as though traveling not upon the globe but deep beneath its surface — with the coaches groaning and the locomotive wailing and smoke and soot and great showers of sparks by night — from tunnel to tunnel and from one remote station to another — each time the same flicker of gas lamps, and the same onrush of blackness, and then the same total nothing — and wherever you looked in the foggy distance, our flour mills standing like titans — talk of resurrection! I am happy, Father; why, we nearly came to grief…

— To grief…

— I mean just that.

— No, you are exhausted, Father. You look drawn. Go to sleep now. Just fetch me another cigarette before you do, and here, in this corner of my childhood, beside the old sofa, I will wait for the dawn. I know myself well enough to know I can’t sleep — I’ll wait for you right here, and whenever you are ready, the trial can begin…

— I mean the accounting that I owe you.

— An accounting. Are you very angry?

— You have every right to be… every right…

— Undoubtedly… every right — until I make you understand — if you can understand — because I fail to understand myself…

— As you wish… are you quite sure? You can stop me whenever you want. Mother has already told me what you have been through these past few weeks, after our “oriental silence” set in… poor Mama! She does not look well. I bit my lips to keep from saying an unnecessary word — one that might betray the fear felt by the doctor in me. What happened, Father?

— When?

— Blood? Good lord…

— In the morning?

— Very well, then… very well… but not now… I will make it my business to look at all those vials and powders before he comes. If I am to help treat her, I shall have to have a good talk with Heshin. After all, you can’t expect me simply to stay out of this; there is no way I can be relegated to the position of a mere observer…

— … if I stick to my corner! Very well, then; but a corner with an unobstructed view. As you wish — we need not go into that now — it is just that I…

— Very well — you have laid down the law… My word, the water is still running up there! By now it is no longer her body that she is washing; it is her very soul, ha ha ha…

— No matter! Let her wash all she wants — it is no affair of mine. She has been dreaming of nothing but this bath for a solid week, as if she were encrusted with the filth of generations — perhaps the water will soothe her sorrow. Hydrotherapy: you can actually find it in the medical books… Just don’t let her fall asleep in it, because she has not slept a wink for three whole days. She simply stewed in the compartment — for hours on end she stood with her head against the windowpane — she crossed the whole of Bulgaria like that…

— I already have sworn it to Mother…

— She is perfectly healthy.

— I suppose she has lost weight; what of it? She’ll put it back on.

— I knew that would give you a fright — but surely you are not afraid that it won’t grow back again…

— She did not do it in Jerusalem; it was in Stamboul, ten days ago. She woke up crying in the middle of the night and found her pillow crawling with them. The hotel had no soap — there was no water left, either — it was a cheap, filthy dive — and right away she began looking for a knife. I begged her not to — half of humanity, I told her, walks around with lice and is none the less human for it — don’t be rash, I said — Father and Mother will still love you, lice and all… But you know how she is — underneath all her smiles, she is as stubborn as a mule — and perhaps she felt the need to do herself injury. I offered to pick them out myself, but she would not let me touch her. She rushed off to the doorman below, borrowed a curved Turkish dagger, stood in front of the rusty mirror, and cut away for dear life…

— I was beside myself too, Father. All that gorgeous red hair lying on the floor with those mortified Turkish lice — perhaps even a louse from Palestine — running about in it… for a moment I almost picked it up and saved it, but by then I was afraid of it myself — and that whole train ride back with her, with everyone staring at her cropped hair — I tell you, it made her more attractive than ever — they were walking up and down the aisles for a look at her! The devil knows why it made her so beautiful — perhaps the way it brought out those high cheekbones — or her eyes…

— Why, nothing, of course. What could I say? Nothing is all I have been able to say for many days now. She has become a different person: wild, bitter, heedless, morose… I have made up my mind — I have had enough — I want nothing more to do with her — I am leaving. I shall go live with Grandmother…

— I am leaving… oh, just wait until you hear about it all, dear Papa!

— Yes, but only there — in that hotel in Stamboul — while we were waiting for the train to Europe…

— We had no choice. My word, Father, we had no choice! Wait one minute — listen, Father — we were running low on money…

— I had no idea how we would ever get out of there… my word…

— Yes. That was my promise and I kept it. Everywhere — even in Venice — everywhere…

— In Palestine too. Naturally. There especially. The first night I slept a floor below her, surrounded by parturient women… and after that, in a hostel miles away…

— I will tell you about it soon enough.

— A clinic of sorts.

— Aboard ship too. Of course. We had private berths everywhere. And if none were available, we asked for a partition…

— Yes. But that was only toward the end of our journey. And we reached Stamboul in the dead of night. I did not want to leave the station, because I was afraid we would miss the train for Europe in the morning — we had had quite enough of the Turks — and there was only one room left there — not to mention the expense…

— What I am saying, Father, is — but listen to me, will you! — why must you be so damnably suspicious? — that we entered Turkey with exactly one hundred bishliks…

— About thirty thalers. I did not want to touch the gold coins — not until I knew where we stood. Look — they are still strapped to my waist — not a coin less than you gave me…

— I know exactly. Everything can be accounted for. You will have an account of every penny.

— Of course, Father, of course. It’s not the money but the principle. I know that. But there were mishaps. There was a tragic accident in Beirut, where we had to stay an extra night — and our ship sailed for Stamboul without us, with all our luggage aboard — by the time we caught up with it, it was gone — even the gifts we bought in Jerusalem had been pilfered…

— Later… one thing at a time…

— A man was killed. A good friend.

— But for heaven’s sake, Father, I am telling you. I was afraid we would run out of money, and we —

— No. I am not shouting. Forgive my asking, but what exactly is it that you want?

— In mourning? In mourning for what? For Linka’s hair? That much at least is retrievable.

— Other things are not.

— For example… for example… no matter…

— No. I do not wish to frighten you.

— For example… suppose, Father, I were to say innocence… or happiness…

— Happiness. Yes.

— In no special sense. Happiness. Innocence. I do not wish to distress you, but we were close to losing her there — she wished to remain — I pulled her out of the vortex with my last strength…

— Of Palestine, dear Papa. Your Eretz-Yisro’el…

— I am skipping around, that is so — you will have to excuse me — but not now, because I see you have not the patience. You are falling off your feet. Go to sleep, Father… tomorrow… just fetch me a cigarette first, because the ones I have are no better than straw…

— From Palestine. They smoke like the blazes there too.

— Not at all. Here, take the whole pack — how stupid of me not to have brought more — I should have realized what a cigarette from there would mean to you…

— This? The devil knows. I suppose it’s some sort of camel.

— Perhaps a Jewish camel.

— They are actually grayer, more sand-colored — rather patient beasts — perhaps because they have such small brains…

— Thank you.

— The Mohammedans, of course.

— Some wander and some do not.

— Most? Most live in cities and villages.

— Yes, real cities.

— Where? Nowhere…

— I did not count, but there are some.

— No, dearest Papa, I am not cross. The wheels of the train are simply still spinning in my head. For five whole days we have been on rails: Europe is quite overrun by them. A young German engineer who came aboard at Salonika and shared our compartment for two days told me that in ten or twenty years it will be possible to cross the entire Continent in a single coach without having to step out onto a platform…

— So he said. But through the window, Father, Europe looks ablaze with unrest, with the profoundest gloom. The wagons are packed — in the villages you see great bonfires — the peasants are leaving their plows and turning into itinerant pilgrims — you see fires in all the fields. Everyone is talking about the fin de Steèle, the last days of this century. There is a sense of exultation, but also of great anxiety, and everywhere there are seers and prophets. It is one great carnival, I tell you! Most of all, the Russian muzhiks, whom you see singing and kneeling and lighting candles all over. And everywhere there are Greeks and Turks out to swindle you, and wherever you look, Father, in every railroad coach, our shifty-eyed Jews too. Some are heading west, some south — very practical pilgrims, you may be sure — not a God-seeker among them — no, Him they carry around on their backs, along with their bundles and their children, quite crushing them — you have no idea how many unwashed Jewish children are underfoot wherever you go…

— We left Palestine two weeks ago. By the Feast of Tabernacles we were already in Beirut…

— With that man.

— The same physician who lured us to Jerusalem… did not Linka write you about him before we sailed?

— Dr. Mani.

— A Jew, of course. What did you think? You wouldn’t happen to have any brandy around, would you?

— I am suddenly shaking all over.

— Well, never mind… as long as we can get this fire going again… I can’t tell you how I dreamed of it… the colder the nights, the more I pictured myself coming home and making straight for it…

— It’s the Sabbath? So it is… I have totally lost track of time… well, then, let’s call for Mrazhik and have him poke some life into the coals…

— Are you sure that you want to hear about it? That you feel up to it?

— I believe I do… but first let’s see to the fire… where is Mrazhik? Don’t tell me he’s become an observant Jew too. How quiet it is up there! Do you think she has fallen asleep? Or is she telling Mama her story in a whisper? Perhaps, Father, you would rather go upstairs and hear it directly from her — don’t let me keep you — my feelings won’t be hurt…

— Very well, then…

— Very well. Let there be two stories, an upstairs and a downstairs one. As for the truth, it can run up and down between them…

— From the beginning? And where, I ask you, is that?

— Don’t be angry. No, don’t; I am not being coy. Incidentally, I met your Herzl, although I had no chance to give him regards from you… it was too hurried and confused an encounter…

— From the beginning? But you already know all that. Linka wrote you three letters.

— All right… all right… but where does the beginning begin? I fear distressing you.

— To Palestine? But what sort of question is that? I mean, for a Zionist like you… or have you forgotten that you sent us to a Zionist congress, ha ha?

— Well, then, we simply took the next logical step…

— But what do you mean, what has that to do with it? Does not Palestine have everything to do with it?

— My apologies. All right, then: from the beginning. The beginning — the journey there — was wonderful. Everything about it. Even the warm weather and clear skies. Already in Katowice you could see delegates gathering in the train from all over Galicia and Poland — a totally Zionist train, except for the invisible driver. Toward evening a second train arrived from Moscow and flooded our car with a large group of youngsters who made a great impression on me. They’re another breed of Jew, Father: full of life — earnest — simply dressed — unashamedly Jewish yet freethinkers, every one of them. They are different from us — self-assertive — the children of pogroms and Pobedonostsev — the bearers of bright hopes. All had brought parcels of food with them to save the expense of eating in the dining car. I could see at once that Linka was drawn to them. Oh, she tried not to show it — but not enough to keep them from noticing her and striking up a conversation. At first of course in Yiddish — and yet it did not take long to find someone who spoke a little French — and someone else who could jabber in English — at long last Madame Zwitowska’s language lessons were bearing fruit! And from then on, Father, everywhere we went — in Switzerland, in Palestine — every one of those languages went with us… although it was only in Palestine — and in English — that the real, the worst damage was done…

— I’ll get to that. Let me tell it in order. From now on it will all be in order, the painful parts too. There will be no avoiding them — they will grow harsher and harsher as this story outgrows its cradle — this story, Father, which —

— Precisely. We are still in that railway car, which by now was all Jewish, the Christians having fled long ago — still in that night that was so full of promise that it made Zionists out of us all, even out of me, who, as you know, has my grave doubts about the matter. Yes, even I was all ears. There was a young couple there from the Ukraine, a big bearded fellow in an embroidered peasant blouse and a girl he had with him. They could not get close to Linka, because she was already surrounded, and so they threw themselves on me — it has always struck me how couples are attracted to me most extravagantly — I am irresistible to them — and began explaining their “political position,” because they had a “program” of their own. Each kept finishing the other’s sentences. And they were not, I soon realized, even delegates, but only “observers,” although terribly revolutionary and conspiratorial ones, with a detailed plan of action. They considered your Dr. Herzl to be as big a tyrant as the Czar and not at all a mere spinner of fantasies…

— A spinner of fantasies.

— There is nothing wrong with fantasy.

— I never said that.

— Of course, Father.

— Nothing is impossible… In any event, dawn broke over the marvelous spires of Prague to find Linka laughing merrily — she laughed her way through the forests of Germany and past the reddish houses of Munich — and there, toward evening, the train spewed us out to stretch our limbs while the locomotive was restoked with coal and the cars were de-jew-migated… And so we went for a walk through the streets and lanes of that most beautiful city, although by now Linka was less walking than floating on air with all those young Russians while I brought up the rear with my couple — which had taken possession of me entirely — thinking that her beauty was far greater than had ever occurred to us here, in our remote little Jelleny-Szad. Apparently, dearest Papa, we had misinterpreted the silence of the flour mills…

— I am saying that that extraordinary, redheaded concentrate of femininity that I had always thought could be understood only by me now had everyone eating out of her hand, which left me imbecilically wondering how I could ever have doubted her powers of communication…

— It does not matter.

— It does not matter.

— Yes, I suppose that I do have a way of saying it does not matter when it does…

— Let me tell it in my own good time.

— I do feel up to it, but let me take my time. You know me: in the end even I always manage to get to the point…

— I did not betray a trust, Father. But even if I did not stick to our plan, don’t you want to know why? There has to be a reason, does there not? Because at first everything went according to schedule. The train left at midnight for your Basel, and we arrived at noon, and took a deep breath of your Swiss air, and went straight to your boardinghouse exactly as you told us that you did last year, where waiting for us were two clean and agreeable rooms…

— So they were. Three flights up.

— Yes, Frau Kuralnik remembered you, as did Herr Frisch.

— And the old man too, of course, the old man too. Everyone was most sorry you could not come, and when I told them about Mama, they were most sorry about her too. And they were all quite taken with Linka, who curtsied to them very prettily. They tried so hard to make the kitchen kosher that there were separate shelves for dairy and pork. Some delegates from England and Belgium had already arrived — everywhere you heard the hubbub of Jews — and suddenly I fell into such a black mood that I went up to my room and threw myself on the bed, quite unable to understand what I was doing there. I must have fallen asleep at once — in fact, I could have slept through that entire congress if Linka had not woken me toward evening, all flushed and excited, with two fancy-looking delegates’ cards that she had gotten hold of in the front office Dr. Efrayim Shapiro and Linka Shapiro, Delegates to the Third Zionist Congress… the devil only knows how she managed to talk them into it…

— So it would seem.

— They were expecting you — and when you did not show up, your only son was recognized as your heir apparent — and for good measure the inheritance was doubled to let your little daughter in too — in such a fashion does our Jewish democracy grow by leaps and bounds…

— I do believe that she was the youngest delegate at the congress.

— She charmed them into it. The minute we left Jelleny-Szad our Linka began to grow up so fast, quite from minute to minute, that no one was not swept off his feet by her. Mind you, Father, all along — inside that virginal shell of hers — in her childhood room with its pale blue curtains and its windows looking out on our gray fields — a woman, a real one, was secretly making herself. I could not get over it: no longer was I an elder brother with a little sister in tow, but a mournful and slightly balding gentleman doing his quiet best to keep up with a vivacious young lady. At first everyone mistook her for my wife — “Madame,” I was told, “is over there”—or, “But where is the charming Frau Shapiro? She promised us she would be here”—while I stood there stammering with a silly grin, “I’m afraid, gentlemen, that she’s only my younger sister.” Ah, what a twinge of sweet sorrow!…

— No matter. I’m talking rubbish.

— Yes, I suppose I have said it again. But you are hanging on my every word while I am talking as though in a dream, Father — you musn’t take me so literally — because the truth of the matter is that everything was upside down — here were you and Mama, sending your obstinate bachelor of a son off to a Jewish congress to find himself a wife — and what does he discover when he gets there but that he already has a wife, and a young and attractive one at that, whom he had better keep an eye on…

— You know as well as I do, my dearest Papa, that your passion for Zionism was not the real reason for sending me…

— Suppose we say the covert, the unspoken reason.

— Fine, call it the additional reason. We can compromise on that. You have your dander up, while I am simply trying to tell a story. Because there is a story here, Father — a little tale that I have brought you back from your Palestine — it is with me on this old sofa like a baby that will cry on and on until it is listened to… Well, the day went by and it was time for the opening of the congress. The two of us were real delegates and had to behave like ones, although it was far from clear whose delegates we were, what district we represented, and where exactly that was. Were we the spokesmen of your fields and forests? Of your flour mills? Or perhaps of all the tracks and train stations we had seen? Because certainly, of the families in our village, neither the Mendels nor the Hefners nor the Urbachs had authorized us to act in their behalf… Still, delegates we were: so it said and so we would be. It was a bright, a most intense evening, with the shining stars looking down on us from afar with a comforting glitter.

— The thought that there was something more eternal than our Jewish worries and Jewish commotions.

— Never mind. It does not matter. To get back to my story, there we were, striding along the streets of Basel with delegates who converged from all over the city — making for the Casino, where the congress was held — and indeed, we were gamblers of sorts, although most respectable ones. The bow ties and black tails blended quite nicely with the colorful outfits of the Swiss girls, the evening dresses, the bare arms of our Jewish delegatesses, the shopping baskets, the hansoms, the taverns — in a word, the local residents regarded us with such indifference — from such depths of normalcy — that it would hardly have made a difference had we been wearing Buddhist robes or Eskimo parkas. However you looked at it, we were Jews, here today and gone tomorrow… while as for our Linka…

— Theaterstrasse… so it was…

— Exactly as you described it a year ago… and Linka…

— Most assuredly it was, Father, that tavern with the golden rooster… exactly… but listen… our Linka…

— I was acutely aware of following in your footsteps all the time, Father… and of feeling most sorry for you… but our Linka, if I may be allowed to proceed

— Sorry that you could not be there yourself.

— Yes, the pastry shop with the whipped cream too…

— You gorged yourself there also? Ha ha, I like that…

— Of course… the synagogue in the Eulerstrasse is still where you left it… but our Linka…

— No, we had no time to visit it. If you will listen, you will hear everything. Because even there in the street our Linka stood out in festive splendor — she had about her a most portentous look that she had been practicing since Katowice and was clutching her delegate’s scroll in one hand like the Magna Carta — and a most bare-armed hand it was too, extending from a black dress that she secretly had made for herself without my knowledge. I do not know if you were privy to it, Father — a most flimsy, foolish, reckless, scandalous bit of sleeveless décolleté! And those arms, mind you, were still a child’s — still plump from a mother’s milk with their childhood freckles — those most discreet freckles, Father — now flaunted for all to see…

— No, no, I don’t mean the freckles themselves. They were simply a metaphor — something aggravating to think about during that grand walk to the Casino — which itself was but a brash overture to what followed — to that feminine promise she gave off wherever she went — you see, I am simply trying to help you to understand what happened later… are you with me?

— Are you with me?

— Ate you listening to me? There was a great crowd by the entrance, and lots of applause and hurrahs, and even my Russians — I mean my revolutionary, conspiratorial observers — were wearing clean shirts and began to clap the minute they thought they made out Herzl’s beard. And meanwhile, two other young men from the train who were lying in wait fell upon Linka and began pulling her toward them while I tried tugging her back the other way… except that at that very moment what did I see but the shining bald pate of Professor Steiner, from the pathology department of the university…

— Yes, he was. And Migolinsky was there too, decked out in black tie and looking quite splendid and earnest — and here I had thought he had baptized himself long ago…

— There was a rumor to that effect, anyway.

— Perhaps he had himself unbaptized again, ha ha…

— Who could have sent him? He was a delegate representing himself, as was everyone. But if a billiard-ball head like him could turn up at a Jewish congress and hug me enthusiastically — why, then, I tell you, there is hope — hope that infected even me — because the fact of the matter is that I was gnawed by doubt whether we were truly ready for this adventure — whether it was not premature to expose ourselves thus to the world — not a mistake, that is, to display the full extent of our weakness — because, after all, we could have gone on nuzzling a while longer at the Christian teat before deciding in all seriousness to rally round a flag and an anthem of our own…

— I believe one was chosen.

— Yes… I’m almost positive… blue and white on a field of gold stars…

— No. It is pointless to ask, because I do not remember. So much has happened since then — and of an entirely different nature — and all I recall is the crowd surging toward the entrance and Linka in her ridiculous dress being swept away by an ardent band of “observers,” with me trailing after her behind my bald professor, who was ushered to a balcony overlooking the stage while I was seated beside him directly in back of a column.

— No. Please, Father, don’t ask me now about the congress…

— An address? Of course… isn’t there always? It was actually more of a report…

— No, I don’t remember.

— Yes. About his meeting with the German Kaiser in Palestine…

— As far as I could make out, nothing. It was all very vague. Rather evasive. Perhaps I did not really understand it…

— About the country itself he said hardly a word.

— Well, perhaps a word. Something or other about Jerusalem. Something poetic about the night there and the moonlight. Having been there myself, I can tell you how little he understood. He is living an idea, not a reality. He talks about the moon, not about the streets — about the ramparts, not about the houses — about the Germans and the Turks, not about the Jews — about the future, not about the present. He is in love with the recipe, Father, not with the ingredients…

— Just three nights in Jerusalem, two of which, it seems, were spent tossing and turning on a billiard table in an inn called the Hotel Kamenitz…

— Apparently there was no bed for him, and so they made one on top of a billiard table. Perfectly symbolic…

— Sad? I would not say so. Not even pessimistic. Rather delirious, however. I was able to observe him from up close, even though I was not concentrating on what he said, because I had trouble following his Viennese accent — and suddenly, dear Papa, I felt a great wave of pity for him. He has not long to live, Father…

— Consider it a medical intuition.

— It is only an intuition — but why scoff?

— The way he perspires — his pallor — the barely restrained tremor of his arms — the black bags under his sunken eyes… If a patient came to me looking like that, I would be alarmed. I would send him at once for a blood examination, for a lung auscultation… he won’t last long — he is living on borrowed time — and who knows if the whole business will not simply go poof when he dies…

— Fine, call it a medical fantasy… Scoff…

— It was purely my own private diagnosis. I stole a glance at Steiner, to see if he was of the same opinion, but he did not seem to be thinking along medical lines. He was following the speech — he was quite carried away by it — there was something almost violent about the way he applauded…

— Wait, Father.

— Wait…

— It was just a thought… don’t be angry… perhaps I’m wrong…

— Then I am wrong.

— I most certainly hope that it is not a one-man movement.

— But wait…

— You? Hah!

— You will outlive us all, don’t you worry…

— Palestine did not affect my mind. Although if someone had told me that night at the congress that twelve days later I would be in Jerusalem, I would have thought him deranged…

— But wait… don’t be angry… it was just a thought…

— You make it sound as if I have already killed him! On the contrary, Father, the session went on and on — there were more speeches, and greetings, and even a few challenges from the floor — and all this time I was wedged between my column and my professor — until finally, late at night, we dispersed and I rushed off to look for my Linka, whom I had lost sight of earlier in the evening, still with my pathologist at my side, now delivering an oration of his own that was replete with original if rather brutal ideas. And so slowly the crowd jostled us out to the street with its din of people and carriages that made me quite dizzy, since I was not accustomed to the proximity of so many Jews, let alone to wearing evening dress. I began to look for Linka and finally spied her in that mob scene surrounded by a swarm of Russians — of pogrom-and-Pobedonostsev survivors — with her ridiculous dress all wrinkled — the very clasps were falling off — and her feverish arms piled high with papers. And on her shoulder, Father, quite nonchalantly but firmly planted — I can still see it perfectly clearly — was a male hand… Well, before I could come to our budding young leader’s rescue, up popped an angry little old man in a top hat, straight out of the sidewalk, and shouted in Yiddish right under my nose: “Is there a doctor here? We need a doctor! Who here is a doctor?” I stepped up automatically, and he gripped my hand fiercely and led me back into the hall that had still pulsed madly with people and lights when I had left it a few moments before. It was already dim and deserted; only a few Swiss help were still there, sweeping up the waste paper with large brooms, snuffing out the last candles, and opening the windows to air out all those moldy speeches. The little old man flew between the chairs with great vigor, pulling me after him to the proscenium — where suddenly he stopped and asked quite forwardly: “Where are you from, young man?” Naturally, when I told him, he had no idea where it was, but when I added that it was near Cracow, his face lit up at once. “But what kind of a doctor are you?” he asked, still standing with me there on the stage. “What do you specialize in?” “Pediatrics,” I replied with a smile. You should have seen his crestfallen look! “Pediatrics?” He mulled it over for a while and then mumbled: “Well, never mind. Come with me.” “But what is the matter?” I asked. “Come quick, someone has fainted,” he said rather mysteriously. He commenced dragging me after him again, opened a door that led backstage into a large, dark billiard parlor, and started up an ornate staircase, pulling me down several long corridors into a room full of cigarette smoke, in which two men were standing by an easy chair. And who do you think, Father, was sitting in it? Herzl.

— Herzl in person, very pale and small — without his tie — without his frock coat — his white shirt open at the neck — but perfectly calm. He was holding a glass of water and speaking French with some friends, although the old man who brought me addressed him most familiarly in German. “I’ve found a young physician from Cracow,” he said. “For God’s sake, Dr. Herzl, please allow him to examine you.” Herzl simply waved an impatient, a dismissive hand; but at once everyone joined the old man in cajoling him to agree, until at last he gave in and dropped his beard on his chest in a most touching gesture of acquiescence. The vigorous old man pushed me toward the easy chair — so hard, in fact, that I almost stumbled, for he appeared to be afraid that if I did not make haste Herzl would change his mind — at which point, Father, listen — listen to me! — I forgot all about my diagnosis. In fact, the same man who had struck me as being little more than a mummy on the stage now seemed terribly vital and real — even the bags under his eyes now looked like an inspired form of makeup. I had no idea what to examine him for. I assumed he had had an attack of vertigo — perhaps a slight syncope — the whites of his eyes were prominent and there was nystagmus. I looked to see if there were any signs of regurgitation — I am quite used to children vomiting in such cases — but there were none; nor was there any smell. I was at a loss. I had no idea what was expected of me. I leaned over until I was close to him, quite overwrought with anxiety — and as I did he looked up at me and threw me a rather merry glance. He spoke in German, and I in a Yiddish that I hoped would pass for German. In an unsteady voice, I asked him what was the matter. He laughed, made some jest to his friends about the doctor feeling faint himself, and held out his hand to me — whether to take my own or in an expression of surprise, I could not say — and so I seized it and quickly began to seek — what else could I do? — the pulse.

— Sometimes it enables you to detect irregularities in the heartbeat.

— That was just it. I could not find any pulse. Perhaps I was not gripping his wrist tightly enough, or perhaps his pulse was too weak. Meanwhile, the door opened and in came two more men with another doctor they had hunted down, a handsome, brown-skinned, stocky man wearing a white frock coat. He bowed to us all with a great show of feeling, and — blushing with emotion, although quite freely and winningly — went over to Herzl and introduced himself in English as Dr. Mani. He made some reference to Jerusalem, where it seemed that he had met Herzl before, but Herzl — who regarded him in the same slightly jocular manner — did not remember him. And mind you, all this time I was standing there holding his wrist and trying desperately — with my heart in my boots — to undo his gold cufflink and find his vanished pulse while more and more people filled the room with more and more doctors, all urgently summoned by Herzl’s entourage — each of whom had gone out to find a physician and some of whom had found more than one. It was beginning to seem more of a medical convention than a Zionist congress. Of course, all the doctors stopped in their tracks the minute they saw me standing by the easy chair and stubbornly clinging to Herzl’s wrist in search of his lost heartbeat — which, even if I had found it, could not possibly have been counted in all that commotion — especially since the patient, who seemed quite delighted at the sight of all those people come to treat him, would not sit still. By now he had his color back and everyone was beginning to relax since the great man was clearly alive and even laughing as if he had simply played a prank on all the doctors to assemble them in one room. But although I had no reason to keep groping for his pulse, I could not let go of his hand; it was as though glued to mine. The more doctors poured into the room, the more paralyzed I became. Everyone was waiting impatiently — although I must say, with collegial politeness — for the impertinent young physician — for I obviously felt nothing and was not counting anything — to finish his absurd examination. And yet I would not give up — not until I saw the shiny crown of my professor of pathology come floating into the room too and grew so genuinely terrified that I finally let the hand drop — whereupon Herzl, with the most magnificent gallantry, rose, took my hand once more in his own, and shook it most heartily in a grateful adieu, ha ha ha ha ha…

— Ha ha ha ha ha…

— Most thoroughly amusing, Father, was it not? Ha ha ha ha…

— Sometimes the artery is collapsed.

— Of course it has a name. Why should it not? Everything in our body has a name.

— Why do you ask?

— The radial artery, or something of the sort…

— Absurd… perfectly… and yet there you are…

— To think that I, of all people, who am so accustomed to weak pulses… in the case of children it is quite common…

— Well, don’t take it to heart… in any case, no one will ever remember it was me…

— Fiendish luck? Come, now, that is putting it a bit strongly… why be so upset by it? I am not about to have my license revoked, ha ha ha…

— No, no one else tried to examine him. They all just wanted to meet him. They were some quite famous professors there who spoke a wicked German, and before long a group of them had formed around him while I retired to a corner — where, if you must know, I was thinking not of Herzl but of Linka, who was no doubt worrying what had happened to me — the lord only knew if she had not already returned to our hotel and lost her way in its dark corridors! And in that same corner — to which he too had retreated from that boisterous outbreak of German — was the doctor from Jerusalem, feeling rejected and rather shamefaced that Herzl had not recognized him — so much so that, when we were given the hint to leave the room and let our pulseless leader rest, he slipped out a back door and disappeared, while I — no doubt attracted to his mortification by my own — ran after him. I found myself in a long, dark hallway, which I realized at once was not the way I had come; but not wishing to retrace my steps, I groped my way onward in pursuit of the shadow ahead of me. He sensed that he was being followed and halted; took a little candle from his pocket and lit it; and held it up to light my way while waiting for me politely… from which moment, Father, you may if you like draw a straight and ghastly line to his death ten days ago in the train station of Beirut, even though in my heart I know well that the two of us, Linka and myself, were only a pretext…

— A pretext.

— A pretext… a pretext for an entirely different reckoning. That is, I was a pretext for Linka, and Linka was a pretext for someone else, perhaps even another woman…

— I ask myself the same question.

— I cannot stop thinking about it; cannot stanch the grief of it…

— No.

— No…

— You aren’t tired?

— I? I have just begun to wake up. Beware of me, dear Papa, because the story and I have become one — my soul has been smelted to it by this fire, which has bewitched me since childhood — so that — who knows — perhaps when I finish this story I will leap into it and vanish in a heap of ashes… brrrr…

— I do not know why, but I have had this chill in my bones since crossing the Bosporus. I feel as though I were levitating.

— That may be so. For a Palestinian like me, though, the autumn here is like winter…

— Fill my glass up, will you?

— No, not with tea… with brandy…

— More.

— Thank you. And that, Father, was how it began: with an encounter in a dark hallway near the service stairs, where a man from Jerusalem was waiting for me with a little candle burning in his hand. I still cannot get over his having that candle ready in his pocket — you would have thought he had spent his whole life being trapped in dark passages — indeed, he had two candles, one for me too, which I lit at once with great joy. To this day I wonder whether had Herzl not had that weak spell, we would have met. Or suppose he had had it and I had not run after the man? But I would have run after him — I was drawn to him — I would have found him — perhaps because from the very first he seemed to me, that stocky man from Jerusalem, the complete antithesis to everything around him… most vital with a great shock of hair… a rather handsome oriental gynecologist…

— Antithesis.

— To all of us. To you, for instance — to the other delegates — to all those German Jewish physicians…

— I do not know.

— A gynecologist. Actually, more of an obstetrician. Do you remember, dear Papa, how I too could not decide whether to specialize in gynecology or pediatrics? You were in favor of women; Linka thought I would do better with children.

— Of course… I can still change my mind… it’s not impossible. But this man was a gynecologist through and through — an obstetrician with a maternity clinic in Jerusalem — and something of a public figure there as well.

— About fifty. But though he could not have been much younger than you, forgive me for saying that he was still unspoiled — even childlike — yet cunning at the same time — although not in an ordinary sense…

— A real clinic. Be patient and I will tell you about it…

— Why should it be just for Jewesses? For Arabs too and Christian pilgrims — for everyone. But be patient…

— A good question! At first we spoke in broken German. Before long, however, we realized that this would get us nowhere; at which point he suggested English, which, I already had noticed, he spoke as flamboyantly as a peacock, rounding his syllables like hard-boiled eggs in his mouth. He swore that it was the language of the future — which did not deter me from throwing up my hands and switching to Yiddish, a language I saw he had some knowledge of, although it came out a mangled Hebrew when he spoke it — so that I suddenly thought: well, then, why not Hebrew itself — it is certainly good enough for two Jews groping down a dark hallway! And that was how we started talking in Hebrew, which slowly started coming back to me in the darkness, so that I thought how proud you would have felt after all your efforts to drum a bit of it into me…

— Real Hebrew, Father, as queer and rusty as it was, with the verbs completely unconjugated, just as you would find them in the dictionary. I must have confused my masculines and feminines too — and yet I must say that it was not unpleasurable to be using the language of our forefathers in that hallway, and even to joke in it a bit — because at first we kept losing our way and ended up descending some narrow little stairs to a wine cellar, each step of which did wonders for my command of the holy tongue — which he himself spoke in a guttural version of the language that sounded as if his throat were on fire. Eventually we realized that we had taken a wrong turn and climbed back up with our candles to the door we first had exited from… only to discover to our dismay that it was locked. There was silence on the other side of it — perhaps Herzl had already been put to bed or whisked away by his friends for another session of Zionism. In any case, I was beginning to panic, because I kept picturing Linka out in the night, in that low-cut dress, looking for me high and low. Just then, though, we heard heavy footsteps, which belonged to a sturdy Swiss servant girl, who was on her way up to her room after a hard day’s work. She directed us through the labyrinth to a back street behind the Casino — and a most narrow and deserted street it was; you could not possibly have guessed from it what a mob of noisy Jews had just been there…

— I already told you, Father. About your age — but unjaded and full of energy — a total antithesis…

— In what sense? In every sense!

— For example? For example… do you think that you, Father — being the person that you are — a respected member of the community — the owner of an estate — the father of a not-so-young but quite capable doctor and a decidedly attractive young daughter — could one day fall madly — passionately — head over heels in love…

— Yes, tormentedly in love…

— You.

— With a young woman — someone like — well, like…

— Ah!

— A devastating love that would make you leave everything — the estate — all of us — to follow your beloved to the —

— No.

— Well, then…

— What?

— Ah…

— You?

— You are jok —

— Then why don’t you, dearest Papa? Yes, why don’t you fall in love a bit, ha ha…

— That is so. What really do I know about you?

— I can only tell you what I think.

— That may be…

— What does anyone know about anyone?

— Hardly a thing

— Two children — little ones — at my age he was even more of a confirmed bachelor than I am…

— Of course he had a wife.

— I will get to her.

— I will get to her… don’t be so impatient…

— Haven’t I told you? Mani.

— Moshe.

— It is a common enough name in the Orient.

— Oh, he was Manic indeed… just wait until you hear it all…

— Yes, the whole story — and nothing but the whole story — but please let me tell it in my own good time — it is a balm for my weary soul. Please let… I feel suddenly gripped by such sorrow over his death!

— I am not shouting… forgive me. Anyhow, there we were in that empty, desolate street, circling round to the front of the Casino. By now he was telling me all about Jerusalem and his clinic, which he had come to Europe to raise funds for because he wished to expand and modernize it. Mind you, I was listening with half an ear, because Linka, I was alarmed to see, was not at all where I had left her. The nearby streets were silent except for a dimly lit tavern here and there in which — when I peered into them — I saw nothing but red-faced, drunken Swiss speaking sadly to themselves. I could have killed myself for leaving her! Where could all our Jews have disappeared to? And meanwhile this Mani kept tagging after me, so excited to have found out that I was a pediatrician that he could not stop talking for a second — about his Swedish nurse who was an expert in painless births and about some new idea of his for building up the blood of postnatal jaundice cases — three of his own infants, so he told me, had died of jaundice themselves — while I simply kept nodding at everything he said, listening as though in a dream. Talk of fright! I could not help thinking of all kinds of things that a person has no business imagining…

— That she had been carried off… that she had been misused…

— I don’t know. Nor does it matter. I was very frightened. Linka and I had never been so far away from home, and by now I saw that there was no hope of finding her in those empty streets — and so I asked Mani to excuse me, because I was in a hurry to get to my boardinghouse, and I told him about my vanished sister, Well, at once he stopped his chatter and offered to drive me to my lodgings in his hansom — first the man had a candle in his pocket, now he had a hansom up his sleeve! He led me to a little back street — and there, Father, was parked a real carriage with a fancy black top and a coachman in red livery, a big-bearded fellow slumped sleeping on his seat. It was, it turned out, the gift of some Jewish banker in Zurich, who had refused to give Mani a donation for his clinic but had agreed to put a vehicle at his disposal to help him put the touch on other Jews. I can still see it, Father, standing in the dead of night on a street corner not far from the Casino with a black, thoroughbred, high-legged horse that looked straight out of the Alps — it had the glitter of the moon in its big eyes! And it was starting there — from the moment I climbed into that carriage — that a straight line — I see it as though in a vision — ran straight to his death… to that hideous tragedy… although the truth, I tell you, is that we were only a pretext…

— Because it is not conceivable that the seed of it was not already there, if only as a dry kernel that lies in the earth without knowing that it is a seed…

— No, Papa, no. I said I would tell everything in order.

— If I am being obstinate, it is only to keep you from leaving me here by this stove in the middle of the night once you have heard the end of my story. Because only the suspense can overcome your tiredness — can bring you to our boardinghouse in that wonderful hansom through the pleasantly cool Basel night — our horse clip-clopping briskly over cobblestones — up and down streets whose inhabitants were already enjoying a well-earned sleep. I still had no idea where all our Jews had gone off to, especially the younger ones; they could not have all gone to bed already. But soon we reached the boardinghouse, which was entirely dark — her window too, which made my heart sink, because that meant she had not come back. I was so afraid of the carriage driving off and leaving me a nervous wreck in the sleeping boardinghouse that I implored my Dr. Mani — who had by now finished telling me that he was born in Jerusalem to a mother who was born there too — to stay and keep me company. Not that he needed much imploring. He was only too happy to oblige. Perhaps he craved human contact after the indignity inflicted on him by Herzl. I burst into the lobby; shook the old grandfather of a concierge who was sleeping on a cot in the dining room beneath some gleaming copper pans on the wall — like red little suns they were, glinting in the night light; snatched the keys from his hand; and flew off to her room. It was exactly as she had left it — exactly as she leaves her room at home — her dresses everywhere — her underwear all over the floor. I felt knifed by anxiety. All evening I had gone about with the knowledge that it was her first day — not the best time for her to be gallivanting around…

— No. Of her menses.

— I knew. I always know. It does not matter. I —

— I have always known since she was a girl. Since her first time…

— Don’t ask me how. I know it — I feel it — I–I don’t know how but I do…

— No. Never mind that, though. This is not her story but rather —

— No, she is not. He is — that wandering obstetric fund-raiser — that Dr. Mani — who sat there with me in the dining room, facing a little oil lamp that old gramps had lit for us, already preparing for his doom — cozying up to his pretext — because that — although why us? why us? — is all we ever were for him. The more anxious for Linka I became, the more he sympathized. He was falling in love with her before he had even seen her — he did not have to see her. And I was beginning to detect a certain oriental softness in him — a rather pariah-like patience — coupled with an ancient and obscure grievance — together with a knack for latching onto you and quickly putting himself in your shoes. He was still carrying on about his clinic and his attempt to raise funds for it. I could see that he wished to take my measure — perhaps as a financial or medical partner — because the minute I told him about our estate, he grew quite ecstatic over his good fortune at having run into not only a Zionist pediatrician, but a rich Zionist pediatrician in the bargain…

— As we were driving in the hansom. I believe I expressed my pleasure at the horse’s light gait and compared it to our own heavy drays that Mrazhik can never get to shake a leg…

— From there it was but a step to the flour mills and the forest. He listened openmouthed, as if trying to gulp it all down.

— No, I told him some medical tales too. About deliveries in the villages. How the Jewesses scream and the Poles sob…

— But they do. Every last one of them.

— You never asked.

— They positively bawl, every one of them.

— The Jewesses? As loud as they can. It is to make sure the baby hears them and remembers to be nice to its mother after all it has put her through. But the Poles sob. The devil only knows why — perhaps, ha ha, it’s for shame at having brought another Polack into the world…

— Idle chitchat, yes. But what was I to do? I was swamped by anxiety, and Mani was the straw I clutched at to take my mind off it. And he did seem a cordial and charming fellow, busily fusing himself to his pretext while the mountains turned purple outside…

— Yes, I am back to pretexts. You will have to put up with it, dearest Papa. That is the word and I had better stick to it if I ever mean to get any sleep…

— No, not yet. Because just then I heard her laughter in the quiet street, a laughter that had a new note in it. It sounded like some ticklish little carnivore’s. A minute later she walked in with a new escort — no longer the children of pogroms and Pobedonostsev but three middle-aged pans, two from Lvov and one from Warsaw — a half anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist Pole who had been sent by the latest right-wing newspaper to find out if there was any truth to the rumors that the Jews were indeed thinking of packing their bags…

— Narojd Ojcizna.

— That is a tune we are going to hear more and more of. An insolent clown of a fellow he was, slightly tipsy. He bowed extravagantly to me and took the slyest liberties with all of us, and especially with Linka, draping his white cape over her bare shoulders — and not for modesty’s sake, I assure you, but to hide the stains she had gotten on her dress in some tavern. She was quite flushed — her dress was creased — her hair was wild. She seemed flustered too by all that gross male gallantry — but believe me, Father, she was enjoying it. At once she began to throw on the table packs of cigarettes, resolutions, pamphlets, reports, manifestos — the whole cornucopia of documents we delegates had been crammed with — and then flung herself at me like a whirling dervish. How could I have gone and left her like that? Why, she had had to put these charming gentlemen to the inconvenience of searching all over for me! I clenched my fists, utterly humiliated. I almost hit her, Father. From the moment I heard that laughter of hers ring out in the night, I wanted to thrash her — I, for whom such a thought…

— You know I have never lifted a hand against anyone. But now I scarcely could control myself — I wanted to thrash her, plain and simple — I, who had never touched her in anger, not even when she was a little brat — not even when you went off to Vilna for Grandmother’s funeral and left me with her for two weeks. In no time we were quarreling in front of everyone, right in the middle of that sleeping boardinghouse — even old gramps, who must have smelled the liquor on the breath of that Zionist goy, came tiptoeing over for a look…

— Everything. Don’t ask. Everything! And most of all, that outlandish white shawl on her shoulders, draped over that most scandalous dress, which I destroyed the next day. All at once she had become the grand lady. You should have seen her holding her hand out for those Poles to kiss — that childish little hand stained with ink, which her admirer from Warsaw put his lips to with unconcealed desire — she was laughing, she was all in a whirl — a once neatly closed little pocket knife that had suddenly sprung open with all its blades…

— No, no, don’t say anything. I was not looking to make a scene. And in any case, at that very moment Mani appeared from his dark corner, stepping out from beneath the burnished copper pans, and I presented him, embarrassed as he was — my pudgy jack-in-the-box — my antithesis — to everyone. “Straight from Jerusalem, gentlemen,” I said furiously, “from Jerusalem itself!” You could actually feel that mysterious city blow through the room like a fresh breeze. The Polish pans grinned — Jerusalem? — you can’t be serious! — while Linka turned to my antithesis with a warm glance. She held out her hand to him and he kissed it (it was then I first noticed that he had a special, an endearing way with women) most nobly and shyly. “He speaks English,” I told her. “You can speak in English to him.” And so she did, without the slightest hesitation — a soft, musical English it was too, like a sweet oatmeal porridge — to which — amazed but appreciative — he replied in that peacock talk of his, the language of the future, as he called it. The Polish gentlemen stood by grinning like idiots, and old gramps wanted to know what it was about us Jews that made us speak four different languages in as many minutes. And it was then, dearest Papa — or at least so I remember it — that I was so seized by the desire to travel to Palestine with that man that I made up my mind to give our Linka a taste of the real thing — to chuck her into the dark bosom of Zionism itself. Jerusalem? Then let it be Jerusalem!

— Let it be Jerusalem!

— Yes, and the sooner the better. I could not wait to be off, if only to get all those pans and their ilk off her trail. And just then I thought of you, Papa, and I felt my gorge rise…

— Because I knew you would never understand and would say no.

— In plain language, that you would not allow us to go.

— Well, it did have to do with you… or so I thought…

— But if we had asked permission, you would not have given it…

— No objection? But just look at yourself now…

— It’s a fact. You are furious. You are…

— What?

— You were not angry?

— I don’t follow you.

— My imagination?

— What?

— No. Where —

— You were glad? But how come? For what reason?

— Proud? How odd… proud! You truly felt that?

— Truly? And to think that when we cabled you from the post office in Venice before boarding ship, I was shaking like a criminal…

— Then Linka was right. I misjudged you… Linka knew better than I did…

—“Papa will only go through the motions… in his heart he’ll be on our side…” But how —

— Still…

— That was all.

— I was wrong — I never thought — I am quite bowled over. Dear, dearest Papa, forgive me! And here I had already decanted your anger into me — I have gone about all this time with your accusing glance boring into me from behind — I have asked myself, “How could you have done this to Papa and Mama and gone chasing camels and donkeys in the desert when you should have been finding yourself a wife in Frau Lippmann’s boardinghouse…?”

— The congress? It was the Third Zionist Congress, Father. There will undoubtedly be a fourth one too…

— I mean… but was it not fully written up in Der Ytd? The fact is, Father, that my mind was not entirely on the congress.

— A great deal of talk. Of speech-making. Of debate. Even our Dr. Mani delivered a little oration to the “Medical Committee” in which he asked for help and invited all the doctors to be his guests in Jerusalem. Why don’t you ask Linka? She can tell you what made the fur fly and what was decided when it settled, because she sat through it all faithfully and did not miss a single session. You should have seen her in her embroidered peasant’s dress — I had already gotten rid of that outrageous black décolleté—taking everything terribly seriously and even keeping notes — a most loyal and responsible delegate from an imaginary constituency. But what constituency was not imaginary? Was Moscow polled on its delegates or Warsaw asked about its? The fact is that I was rarely at the sessions because I was already secretly planning our journey to Palestine. I acted quite clandestinely, Papa. I did not breathe a word to Linka or to Dr. Mani, who had let slip the name of his ship, which was sailing from Venice to Jaffa on the first of September. I believe he had a sixth sense of it, though. He took to following us around, sitting with Linka whenever he could and speaking to her in the language of the future. But my thoughts just then were not of them. They were only of you…

— Of you. Of your anger — your shock — no, Father, you cannot deprive me so easily of the conviction that you were furious…

— Delighted? But how can that be? No, I don’t want to hear another word, you stubborn man, you, ha ha… Why, this most whimsical journey of ours would never have tasted so delicious if it had not been partly aimed against you…

— Against all your bourgeois Zionists. You don’t know how disappointed I am, Papa dear, to hear you say that you were not in the least annoyed.

— True — it is an odd thing to be disappointed about — but there you are. And do you think it was so easy to get from Basel to Palestine? I had no notion where to begin. I went to the Bahnhof to ask for train schedules and information, but I soon realized that there was little of either and that the Swiss would only drive me to despair, first by not understanding my German and then by not understanding my question, since Palestine for them was not a place on the map but a location in the Bible. Ultimately, however, they saw who they were dealing with and sent me to a Jewish clerk, a soft-spoken young lady not much older than Linka, who had run away from a fanatical family of Hasidim in Vilna to attend the first congress two years ago and decided not to go back. And so she had stayed on in Basel, living from hand to mouth between congresses, during which she found temporary work at the Bahnhof — where the authorities had seen fit to open a “Jewish bureau” for the delegates, who — once the proceedings were over — wished to travel to various boardinghouses, hotels, and sanatoria in the green heights of Europe and recover there from their national responsibility while digesting it thoroughly…

— No, that’s true. There were good people there too, conscientious and with a sense of the occasion. But — why deny it, Father — there were plenty of freeloaders also — people like myself, for example — who only came to divert themselves at the expense of Jewish destiny, which they regarded as they might a game of whist…

— Why, our whole trip had been intended as nothing more than a diversion — until it suddenly changed course…

— Hold on a minute, will you! Don’t you want to hear about the Jewish clerk from Vilna?

— As a matter of fact, she was not especially pretty, Father. She was pale and rather sickly looking — a consumptive, I had already decided — but a sharp-witted and free-mannered young thing, with a most Talmudical mind. And she was an expert in the map of Europe, which she knew by heart and could slice in any manner in her head. She knew every train — the name of each station — the departure and arrival schedules — the points of connection. She could describe the compartments for you in every class — tell you where each number seat was — advise you which coaches were best — and needless to say, quote the price of everything. In a word, an incomparable young lady! She took a liking to me too, and when she heard that I wished to travel to Palestine she all but made the journey her own, as if she intended to go with me. Despite her doubts about Mani’s Greek ship that was sailing from Venice, which she thought too light a craft, she dashed off a telegram to the agent reserving us two of his best cabins and began to plan our route. She was — how shall I put it? — most enthusiastic, and at once my flagging spirits revived. And so I roamed back and forth between the congress and the Bahnhof, hatching my secret plan, which still seemed to me little more than a fantasy. On the afternoon of the third and last day of the congress I went to see my little consumptive and was handed a handsome folder with our train tickets, our travel papers, and our entire itinerary written out in Yiddish — and a most ingenious itinerary it was too, with all the travel at night and the days kept free for touring. Nothing had been left to chance: where we would stop, and what we would eat, and the sites we would see, and what it would cost — and of course, how we would return from Palestine… she had planned every step of the way. All that was missing was the height and direction of the waves… which, alas, Father, turned out to be the most important thing of all, ha ha…

— Wait, I will get to that. That evening, in her little cubby in the crowded Bahnhof, I paid her for the trip, took her small hand in my own, and — her eyes were suddenly bright with tears, that’s how hard it was for her to say good-bye — kissed it devoutly…

— Four thousand Swiss francs.

— The exchange rate, I believe, is —

— More or less…

— More or less…

— Perhaps a bit more… is that really so dear? The boardinghouse in Lugano would have cost something too.

— Of course. Nothing but first class, as befits the son and daughter of gentry…

— I had not said a word so far to Linka, who was faithfully attending the congress and not missing a single speech in that whole deluge of speeches. Sometimes Dr. Mani sat on her right and sometimes I sat on her left, quietly smiling to myself. I knew she suspected something, but — no matter how piercing and questioning her glance grew — she had no way of guessing what that was. We still had not made up after that night of the pans — when we talked, it was in short, brusque sentences — and that evening in the boardinghouse — it was a particularly warm one — she showed me without a word her dress for the closing ball. I must say, it was perfectly presentable…

— Yes, there was a closing ball, Father. Was there no such thing at your congress?

— Well, this time they must have decided on a modest one to cheer us all up after the German Kaiser’s cold shoulder. That is, “our elected officers” closeted themselves in a small hall and elected themselves to various positions, while the hoi polloi put on its frock coats, evening dresses, and jewels, and danced up a storm. The Viennese waltzes were already gaily playing when we arrived, and outside the Casino — in the line of carriages parked on the main street — I was astonished to see Dr. Mani’s black-topped hansom packed with bundles and valises and already prepared to set out. The big coachman stood by in a blazer with his whip in one hand, while his horse, which was supping on a sack of barley hung around its neck, looked up from its meal with a heavenward roll of its bloodshot eyes. What — I asked the coachman — did all this mean? It meant, he explained succinctly, that they had decided to leave for Arth-Goldau ahead of time on account of the heat, since the horse did better in the cool of night. By now I was afraid that Mani might vanish before knowing we were about to be his guests, and so I hurried into the dance hall and found him in a black frock coat, waltzing a ponderous, old, diamond-bedecked English Jewess. He was talking to her quite somberly — no doubt about his clinic, for which he must have been hoping to pluck from her a last-minute contribution. Linka, despite her modest dress, was already besieged by young men, and so I went off to a corner and smoked cigarettes in a chain, my travel plans safely inside my head. Despite the great heat, I was actually trembling from my secret.

— Dance? I am not, you know, much of a dancer — and the women, apart from Linka, did not seem especially light on their feet — but the truth is, Father — the truth is — that if my little consumptive from the Bahnhof had been there, I might not have been able to resist asking her for one waltz.

— So it would seem. I grew rather fond of her, but she does not have long… believe me… a dry cough like hers…

— But again, what do you want from me? You take me for the murderer when all I am is the witness…

— Yes, perhaps that explains my fondness for her… how astute of you, ha ha… ha ha ha ha ha…

— No, don’t say that, Father, not now. You will live, don’t you worry — you will live for a long, long time. I don’t think you have realized yet that this story is not about me. It is about him, Mani, who finally gave up on his Anglo-Jewess — she had not made herself one diamond lighter for his benefit — and parted from her with a deep bow before sitting glumly down beside me with his eyes on our merrily waltzing Linka. And I ask myself: if he was already determined to take his own life — if the idea was even then in him like a living seed — why did he not do it right then and there, in that blue-toned dance hall, in front of all the delegates? It would have made an immeasurably greater impression than waiting for the dusk of day in that wretched train station in Beirut…

— The devil knows, Father…

— The devils… no, no…

— Because I saw how he was clinging to me, unable to say good-bye. And I, Father, suddenly began to shake, stirred by the journey that was pressing on my heart like a hot coal. I was beginning to get cold feet — it was not, after all, too late to change my mind — to cancel everything — to let the itinerary in my pocket take the place of the trip itself…

— I was frightened… I don’t know of what… frightened of Palestine…

— No. Your anger only spurred me on…

— Of Palestine itself. I kept picturing it, like a little yellow viper at the tip of the large map that hung in my clerk’s cubby with P-a-l-e-st-i-n-e spelled out on it in black…

— Perhaps the shape of the letters… But anyway, Papa dear, that was what I sat there thinking. And next to me was my brown-skinned gynecologist from Jerusalem, feeling low over haying to part and waiting to say good-bye to Linka, to whom he had become quite attached. All at once I felt sorry for him — odd as it sounds, he seemed to merge in my mind with the travel clerk from Vilna, who had labored over my trip — so sorry that I broke my silence and asked him in a low voice — since I might soon wish to take him up on it — if his invitation to Jerusalem still stood. He crimsoned with surprise, which made me wonder whether all his generous offers of hospitality had not been extended on the basis of the fullest confidence that there was no one who could possibly accept them. Presently, however, he stammered with great feeling: “You wish to come to Jerusalem?” “Yes,” I answered gently, fingering the packet of travel documents in my breast pocket, which yielded with a soft, pleasant crackle. “Yes, I do,” I repeated, speaking in the first person, because I had no idea what Linka would say. “I am sailing from Venice on the first”—I took a piece of paper from my pocket and read what was written on it — “on the Kereiti Zurakis” When he heard me utter the name of his ship, he sat up and grabbed my wrist, as if seeking to ascertain from my pulse whether or not I was pulling his leg. For a moment or two he was speechless — and when he could speak again, he said: “In Jerusalem you are my guest.” “I will be most honored,” I said — we were still talking in terms of “I” and “you,” as if I did not have a sister with me. He rose and circled me in his excitement. “And will mademoiselle be coming too?” he asked. It was strange to hear Linka called that — strange too to hear him ask with such emotion — because — although I knew that he had fallen in love with her before seeing her — I had no idea that he was still in love with her after seeing her, since she was only a —

— Bravo, Papa! Yes, a pretext. You need not smile. That is all we were for the passion that had been lurking in him for so long that perhaps he had even snatched it from his mother’s womb… Yes, dear Papa, that is an indispensable part of my conception…

— Wait, don’t say anything… just hold on, for God’s sake…

— Linka has not been talking to me since Beirut. The most I could get out of her were yes-or-no answers when it came to planning our travels…

— I never forced her to do anything. On the contrary, I said to Mani: “Mademoiselle? Let us ask her to speak for herself.” I rose, waited for the music and the waltz to stop, spirited her away from the outstretched arms of her would-be partners — do not think, Father, that there was any lack of them — and brought her all flushed in the face to Dr. Mani, who kissed her hand — he was aware that by now she expected no less — while she radiantly flashed him her wonderful, prodigal smile. “Linka,” I said to her, “Linka — Dr. Mani is inviting us to Jerusalem and I am inclined to accept — what would you say to our setting out tomorrow morning for his Palestine?” All she had to answer was, “My dear brother, I don’t know what has gotten into you, but you are quite mad,” and I would have gone off at once to a corner, torn up every last travel document without a thought for what it had cost, and gone straight to Lake Lugano as you wished me to — straight to Frau Lippmann’s boardinghouse, Father — to ogle the Jewish lovelies of Europe gathered there for matrimonial purposes and to ask myself — not for the first time, I assure you — exactly what about them turns my stomach. But Linka’s smile just grew brighter and broader, as though glowing out of the darkness where her newly hatched soul was beating its wings — as long as I live, Father, I will never forget how she showered me with kisses, hugging me with a childlike trust, as if I had providentially granted her very wish — as if during the two days of my secret comings and goings from the gare her intuition had already told her everything — had made her guess our destination without comprehending that there had to be some means of getting there — that there was no magic wand to transport us straight from that dance hall to the center of Jerusalem. I tell you, I felt butterflies…

— My stomach?

— Yes — ha ha — that is where I feel things… I was in fact slightly nauseous — but it was only my lack of resolve — you need not worry about me — a most yidlike lack of resolve, which I shall overcome one day in order to find myself a yiddess and jump right into bed with her…

— No.

— No…

— Perhaps we should stop here, Father. What is the point of going on? Linka can tell you the rest of the story, and I will spread a blanket here by the stove and lie down. I must have caught something from one of those damned pilgrims. Why, I’m shivering! The fire could not be any colder if it were just a painting of one. Is Stefa sleeping also? Here, let me stir up the coals a bit — by now God must be asleep too…

— Such virtue as I have displayed can be allowed at least one little sin…

— If you insist. By now it was midnight. Our elected leaders, led by Herzl and Nordau, filed out of the small hall to a burst of cheers and applause. There were some short, rosy speeches and some toasts, and all at once everyone was talking about the next century and about the next congress. “Fin de siècle!” somebody called out — a shiver ran through us all — “fin de siècle!” the cry was taken up — you could feel the hatred for this old century of ours, which everyone will be glad to say good-bye to, and the warmth for the new one on its way — the twentieth. The three of us stood excitedly off to one side, no longer a part of it all. Mani could not bear to leave us. Indeed, he might have lingered there forever had not the coachman entered the hall in his traveling blazer, swept in upon his black beard. He sullenly elbowed his way, whip in hand, through the crowd of cheering Jews — he had quite run out of patience and was in a thoroughly vile mood — it made a splendid, a perfect antithesis to all that Jewish dignity to see the three of us marched out of there — all but whipped out — by Mani’s coachman, who practically flung him into the hansom. It was thus, rather dejectedly, that he bade us farewell, unbelievingly asking over and over: “But will you truly come?” Linka promised him we would. She hugged him as a child hugs a father — all in English, of course, which by now was their own private language — and suddenly gave him a kiss. You would think that I, who found that sudden kiss most charming, would have realized that it was only the first — but I did no such thing. I was too busy gaping at all the bundles and valises tied to the black-topped hansom — at that earnest black horse — at the passenger sitting inside — who did not look — no, not then in the middle of the night — like a man bound for a country that was our common goal, but rather, like one being sent back to some starting line. That night —

— No. That night —

— Yes. That night Linka wrote you her first letter, which I confiscated in the morning, because I was so concerned for you and Mama that I was still thinking of calling the whole thing off. Now, however, it was she who would not hear of it; it was just like her to feel obliged to honor her promise to our Eastward-ho-ing doctor; and I grew so fearful that she might decide to make the voyage by herself that I had no choice but to give in. The next morning we went to buy traveling clothes more suitable for our trip than the lace dresses on Linka’s shopping list. We bought ourselves blazers like the coachman’s, and cork helmets for protection against the sun, and fine silk scarves for protection against the dust — here, this rag around my neck is what is left of one! At teatime we boarded a train for Arth-Goldau, and the next morning, by the lakeside there, Linka wrote you a second letter, which I expropriated too: I still had my doubts, you see, about the entire business. But evening found us on a train again, heading southeast, for Lugano, where we arrived on Saturday morning. Since we had a long stopover there, we rented a carriage to tour the town and even dropped by Frau Lippmann’s boardinghouse, entering incognito in our blazers and cork helmets for a gander at the dressed-to-kill yeshiva students who had just finished the morning prayer and were now assembled in the lobby to bless the Sabbath wine while keeping an eye out for possible wives. In the end, we introduced ourselves to Frau Lippmann. She was quite furious about the cancellation — she would not, she said, refund so much as a franc from the advance you had paid — she even refused to surrender a letter from you until Linka wheedled it out of her with gracious smiles. And so we sat down to read your lovely correspondence, passing it back and forth to make out what it said while thanking our lucky stars for sparing us the torments of such an establishment — after which we continued our tour of the town, which is quite beautiful. That evening we boarded a sleeping coach for Milan, from which I wrote you my first letter, although in my concern for you I pocketed that too. On Sunday morning we arrived in Milan. We found an overcast city drenched by a summer downpour with lots of Italians buzzing all around us — with church bells ringing — with all the restaurants shut down. And so we joined a crowd of worshipers for mass in the duomo, taking refuge there from the rain and kneeling when everyone else did, although you may rest assured that we did not touch the Sacrament. And that was all we saw of that gray, busy city, because we were in a hurry to catch the train for Venice — in the compartment of which we struck up a conversation with a most helpful German. (This was not the first time I noticed that Germans on trains befriended us with great ease. There was something about us they took to — we must have seemed to them a charming couple — and finding out that we were brother and sister only made them grow fonder of us.) This particular German was an educated man, a novelist, who traveled to Venice every year and was well acquainted with the city and its treasures; he gave us much useful information, such as the fact that there are epidemics in Venice at the end of every summer that the authorities try to hush up. We must not, he made us promise, drink any unboiled water or eat any fruit — indeed, he so thoroughly alarmed us that I all but pulled the emergency brake and returned to Frau Lippmann’s at once in the hope that she might take us in in her mercy.

— Yes. I had an attack of panic and wanted to turn around and head back — to pretend that it was all just a fantasy — a passing dream — that we had indeed never left Lugano. But when — exhausted and practically sleepwalking — we stepped out of the train station onto the Grand Canal and saw the marble palaces shimmering above the slimy water — saw that city — that jewel of culture — tottering on the banks of its fetid, scummy waterways — we grasped in a trice how magnificently tenacious the human spirit is — we felt such a surge of love for humanity — for its suffering and — yes! — its epidemics — that we walked — wide awake now — into that dream of our own free will, because Venice is in fact a waking dream…

— Yes… yes…

— Yes… we remembered… we both remembered it simultaneously…

— Yes… yes… so you were…

— It was Grandfather who paid for that trip? What ever made him so bold and original…?

— Yes… we were following in your footsteps without having planned it that way… how cunning the human soul is!

— Thirty years ago! Wait… that was in 1869! We kept imagining how the two of you must have looked then — you, Father, still with your sidelocks — a Jew in black in a black gondola, ha ha…

— A young woman, of course… hardly more than a girl… the same age as Linka…

— Thirty years, I kept telling myself. Perhaps I was even conceived there, eh, Father? The canals have rather a placental smell… was it there?

— But we wrote you every day!

— In back of San Marco, in the Hotel Roma…

— Two rooms, of course — each of them palatial…

— A thousand lirettas per diem.

— You can figure it out according to the exchange rate.

— Quite sumptuously… and no one would believe that Linka was Jewish… ma no, they simply all said…

— Terribly hot.

— There was not a sign of it — a pure figment of the literary imagination… One morning we crossed paths on one of the canals and called out jokingly, “Where is your plague, signore?”

— We were careful, naturally. We drank wine instead of water and asked for tea when we were thirsty and let it cool while looking out at the sea that sent its long, lavishly bejeweled fingers into the city — fingers, mind you, that could easily have seized and swallowed us had the tide but risen a little… On our last evening we went to the harbor to see if Mani’s ship really existed. And indeed, it looked like a mirage, a small, flimsy thing equipped with an auxiliary sail. I shuddered at the sight of its frailty — but Linka just laughed as though drunk and insisted on going to a restaurant by the water to eat seafood.

— Shellfish. Clams — snails — all sorts of underwater grasshoppers that are fried in butter…

— I don’t know what got into us… perhaps our excitement… or the sheer abandon of sucking away at all those pinkish mollusks…

— Perhaps we feared ending up at the bottom of the sea without ever having tasted any of those creeping-crawling-Christian delicacies…

— Most heathenishly… Linka could not eat enough of it…

— Boiled — fried — grilled… were you not there?

— No matter. We ate, and the next morning we rose early and went to the harbor to make sure of our cabins. We hung our clothing in their little closets and went ashore again — and only then, when I knew that you could no longer call us back, did I send my first telegram and let Linka post the letters to you. Then we reboarded the ship and waited on deck for Dr. Mani — who, however, did not appear. There was a steady flow of Arabs, Egyptians, Greeks, Turks, even an English couple, even some Russian monks — but our doctor had vanished into thin air, as if he indeed had been a fantasy of ours. A chill ran down my spine. What was I to do? Where, madman that I was, was I taking her? I was all for abandoning ship while there was time, but Linka refused to lose hope — no, not even when the ship began to rumble and a large sail was run up on the yard. And just then what did we see but the same carriage that had set out from Basel in the dead of night, crawling up the pier beneath its cargo — its coachman hatless, jacketless, in his shirtsleeves — his beard unkempt — most agitated and besotted — cracking his whip at the pavement. Beside him was our portly Dr. Mani in his white suit; bareheaded too, with his hat tied to a lanyard on his shoulder; but fresh-looking and in fine fettle as he ordered the longshoremen to unload. We shouted to him from the deck — he saw us at once and waved his hat buoyantly — the plotters and deckhands fell upon the carriage and — for time was short — quickly whisked all its baggage to the hold. Meanwhile, the coachman was tussling fiercely with Mani, who was wagging a little black notebook at him. We had no idea what the fellow was so upset about — he kept clinging to the bridle of the horse, which was pawing uneasily — until suddenly the Greek deckhands returned, hustled him away, freed the horse from its harness, pulled a large gray sack over its head, and — cheered by the onlookers — tugged it with much hilarity aboard the ship. Mani followed close behind them; the rope gangplank was raised; and the ship, which was straining at the leash, began to move from its berth, leaving the Zurich banker’s hansom all alone on the pier with its traces drooping on the pavement. The big coachman stood in the space vacated by the horse, a despairing and incredulous figure, until he and his carriage shrank to a single small dot.

— Yes, dearest Papa. He made off with the horse. He would have appropriated the hansom too, had it been possible to get it aboard ship; he would have shanghaied the coachman, could he have gotten away with it; he would have ripped out the cobblestones beneath the carriage wheels had he been able to, so great were his despair and anger at the rich Jews who had turned him down. He was an infinitely hungry man; and had I but taken the trouble to scrutinize that desperate, that artful hunger of his instead of mooning at him and Linka bantering in English and bringing each other up to date on their adventures, I would have had the wits to realize that it could not be sated by a horse — no, not even if it were the noblest thoroughbred.

— The horse? I will get to it in a minute… You are just like a child, Papa dear…

— In a minute… For the moment I was still gripped by fear and anxiety, although I must say, by pleasure too. I thought of my telegram that was speeding, letter by letter, through the air to you — humming unchallenged over the wires and down through the tile roof of the old post office — handed there on a gray slip of paper to Wicek — who would jump on his bicycle and pedal off with it to your office, for you to read it between consignments of flour… Such were my thoughts as we brushed through the mists of Venice, which — golden and wondrous — vanished in a violet fog. I sought to fix my mind on the rocking motion of the black waves beneath me, leaning on the railing and breathing in the new salt air. At first it was pleasant, like being an infant laid in a cradle. Little by little, however, I began to grasp that not only was the motion not going to cease, it was going to grow even greater. We started to pitch more strongly, and with it came the first wave of nausea. My body felt cold. The very soles of my feet were covered with a chill sweat. I began to vomit, throwing back to the sea all its denizens of the night before — followed by my breakfast in the hotel — and then the steak from the night train to Venice — and on and on, wave after wave until I had puked out my guts, which I would have heaved into the great ocean too if only they had been detachable — after which I buckled to the ground, collapsed on the wooden deck, and passed out…

— Yes, seasickness, of the malign nature of which I could have had no idea. To think that a man can live his whole life and never know that the sea is not just a compendium of rivers! Most of the voyage I spent drugged with sleeping powders that our friend from Jerusalem prepared for me, limply sprawled on my cot in my little cabin. Linka and Mani ministered to me with English tea, dry biscuits, and soft gruel, all conveniently easy to regurgitate. They did their best to cheer me up with funny stories about the black horse imprisoned below in the hold; it too was seasick and quite wild-tempered, kicking out to protest its destination — it was not, after all, a Zionist — and if fate had decreed that it be one, it did not wish to be of the pioneer variety — no, it would have vastly preferred to wait for Dr. Herzl to obtain his international charter from the Turks so that it could make the voyage first-class with the accompaniment of a German naval escort, ha ha…

— Ha ha ha…

— Well, we are landlubbers, solid citizens of Central Europe — is it not inhuman to toss us up and down on the waves?

— Unremittingly, for seven whole days. All the way to Crete, which is the island that ship is named for, because that is its port of call on its route to Europe and back. Indeed, legend has it that Europe was born there…

— Only one night. It is a night that the sailors spend with their wives in their shanties. I demanded to be brought ashore — where, on the sand amid some rocks, I curled up beneath a blanket and clung with all my might to terra firma, trying to put my shattered self back together while watching Mani and Linka lead the black horse in its headsack out of the hold, because the captain refused to put up with its tantrums any longer and demanded that it disembark.

— Yes, Linka too. What with my sickness and the horse they had grown quite close to each other — although now I know that it was not until that bright night — that night strewn with stars on that strange and desolate isle — that it started…

— Their romance — their love — their bond — their passion — their dependence — their pity… will that do? The minute I saw him insist on taking that horse aboard ship, I knew that there was nothing simple about him, that he was most exceedingly Mani-fold…

— They sold it that night. Some Jewish trader took them far inland to find a buyer in one of the villages.

— Where are there not Jews, Father? Tell me that Tell me!

— He asked her to help negotiate the sale. He must have sensed that a canny merchant’s daughter would know how to drive a hard bargain.

— Did I not already tell you? A wife and two children.

— Of course we did. A rather bleached-out woman, a bit older than him. A stay-at-home, vitiated by three infants who died soon after birth…

— That same night.

— I was stretched out on the sand, swaddled in my blanket, gazing up at the stars. I could feel the whole island rocking up and down in the water. When I saw them come back late at night, I understood that something had happened They seemed suddenly timid with each other — careful — even wary — and there was something too about the way Linka flung herself on me, about her worry for me…

— They had sold the horse. I envied its being able to remain behind in the mountains.

— How extraordinary that you should want to know a pointless detail like that…

— Don’t ask me. Ask Linka. She was a party to the sale.

— Three more days to Alexandria. And then to Jaffa, where we docked on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

— I had nothing left to throw up. My seasickness had turned into sleeping sickness, I simply could not keep awake. It was of course from those powders that Mani used to calm the nerves of his parturients. The morning we reached Jaffa, I was brought out on deck to revive before the Turks decided that I must be ill with the plague and could not be admitted to the Holy Land…

— No. It does not exactly have a harbor. The ships cast anchor at a distance from shore, and the stevedores come aboard and throw you down into dinghies.

— Mohammedans, of course.

— Local residents.

— Are you back to that again? Why should they be nomads? Where do you want them to wander to?

— In a word, they are not nomadic.

— Most in houses. Only a few in tents.

— I did not count.

— Don’t be in such a hurry to dismiss them…

— The Turks? They are adorably lazy and corrupt… We were not asked many questions. Mani’s British passport worked wonders.

— The immensity of the light.

— Because there is nothing to deflect it. No forests. No woods…

— Here and there you see a tree.

— Soft white sand. Golden dunes. They are pleasant to look at, but wearisome to walk in. Your legs grow enervated.

— It is a sunny country. There will be enough sunshine for all of us there, that much I could see at once.

— We went straight from the port to the train.

— Yes, a real train. It runs from Jaffa to Jerusalem. It is smaller and slower than our own trains, a bit childlike. But since we arrived on a Jewish holiday, and the passenger trains in Palestine are religious also, we had to —

— Does that please you? I knew it would.

— They grumble and put up with it. It is the price paid for the privilege of living in the Holy Land.

— To a fault. But loathe to be stuck in the sands of Jaffa — Mani had promised his household that he would arrive in time for the holiday — we hurried off to a freight train, which was transporting — guess what, Papa! — what do you think?

— Guess.

— Guess again…

— Barrels of water!

— Ordinary drinking water. It had been a dry, thirsty summer in Jerusalem, and — since the Danube has yet to be diverted there — they needed a resupply of water…

— A single pipe that cuts across the mountains.

— It is not a desert — not yet — but the countryside is neglected — you see nothing but boulders and rocks…

— A few olive trees — bushes — all sorts of brambles. There is a tindery smell of straw and sometimes a sharp whiff of mint…

— There are no mountains, Father. There are grayish hills, which look like… like… I don’t know what. Like hills…

— I was glad to be getting away from the sea, even though it was odd to be entering Palestine in such a fashion, in a sealed boxcar among big quiet barrels of water. And at the same time, I was delighted to be done with the diabolic motion of the waves.

— Linka had grown profoundly silent. She lay in a corner, in a light Egyptian smock she had bought in Port Said, red from the sun and frightened by the thought of soon meeting the family of her strange new love.

— How you keep coming back to the landscape! A person might think that nature meant more to you than people…

— I have told you that the car was sealed. There was but a small transom, through which I could not see very much. Near Jaffa, I believe, we passed an agricultural school — its name was…

— That’s correct. After it came an Arab town whose name I do not recall…

— Perhaps.

— No, it was not large. Nothing is large there.

— Back to your tents again? But why should there be tents? There were shanties — mud huts — stone houses set like boulders in the landscape…

— Perhaps there were a few tents. We did not see much, because dusk falls quickly there. One minute the sun is scorching hot and the next it is gone. The train was still laboring uphill to Jerusalem as the last glow of twilight faded away in the car…

— At seven in the evening, after traveling for five hours and stopping for two more.

— Jerusalem? A small, poor, harsh city. And yet oddly enough, it does not seem remote. There is nothing provincial about it. Nor will there ever be…

— Spirituality? I suppose. But what might that consist of? Perhaps of the name “Jerusalem.” That is all thè place has to vouch for it. Its name is greater than anything in it — than any mosque — than any church — than all its ramparts…

— How greedy you are for details, Father — you simply cannot get enough of them! It is all I can do to stick to my story and keep from blurting out its bloody end, whereas you want a pilgrim’s travelogue… It was nighttime when we arrived, and we saw neither ramparts, towers, spires, nor even men. It was a little country station, smaller even than Chozow’s, more rudimentary even than Wylicka’s. The only souls there were a few Arabs with wagons to load the water barrels on, and while Mani went looking for someone to take our luggage, Linka and I walked along the tracks to stretch our limbs — two travelers from faraway Galicia who had reached the end of the line, which was marked by a small barrier consisting of a wooden board. Beyond it was nothing, only a few brambles. We had arrived at the last stop. There were no switches, no sidings. It was a single, narrow, very finite line.

— Amen, Father.

— And all the way to Transjordan too. Why not? With northern and southern trunk lines, God willing…

— If the Jews make it their business to help Him a little… In any case, Linka, who had been immobilized throughout the ride, began imploring me all of a sudden to tell our Mani that we would not impose on him but would find lodgings elsewhere; she evidently was unprepared to face the fact that he had a home and a family. I refused. There were nothing but fields all around — Jerusalem seemed at that moment to be no more than a parable — the night was coming on fast — and if we had missed the first dinner of the holiday, there was still the second one, to which I had been invited in Basel. “Absolutely not,” I said — and before Linka could think of an answer, the porters arrived and loaded our baggage on two flat wagons with swinging oil lamps. And so off we drove through the fields into the evening, giving the city a wide berth to avoid irritating any worshipers who might be wending their way home from synagogue. We climbed a high hill on which stood a German orphanage named for a man called Schneller; lurched across a field along a goat track; and arrived at a large, isolated, two-story stone house.

— Of course, Father. All this was outside the walls of the old city. There are several small but attractive neighborhoods there, among them one of Jews from Bukhara that is not far from Mani’s house. There is even some greenery — upon my word, had I not known we had left Switzerland, I would have thought we were back there again…

— No, not only Jews, Father. The Arabs are venturing out of the old city too. The place is simply not big enough for everyone…

— Yes, it stood all by itself, in a solitude serendipitous at so holy a time, at the juncture between the two days of the holiday. It enabled the porters to unload in a hurry in an inner, flagstone-paved yard far from sacrilege-espying eyes — far from any eyes at all except those of an old Mohammedan peasant, who was crouched by a cistern with a cigarette cupped in his hand. Our Mani was beaming with excitement. “Come,” he whispered to us without climbing the stairs to the second story where his family was awaiting him, because he yearned to see his clinic — and we stealthily followed him into a large room full of white partitions that separated some beds, most of which were empty, although from several of them pregnant women regarded us with curiosity. We nodded hello to them; noted with surprise some large, white, well-scrubbed chamber pots all standing in a neat row; and saw a hefty matron approach us from the room’s far end, a blond woman dressed in white. Upon seeing that it was her doctor home from abroad, she let out a cry of joy and curtsied low to us — she could not shake our hands, you see, because her own were smeared with blood. Although I did not understand the Judaeo-Spanish that Mani spoke to her, I could tell that he was introducing me as a medical specialist who had come from afar to see his experimental clinic and its equipment. Repeatedly I heard him mention our estate as if it were a famous medical center — it was a name he could never get right and that Linka had long despaired of correcting his pronunciation of.

— Each time it was something else. If he did not say Jelleny-Czad, he said Jelleny-Szak. In any event, before we knew it, the blond matron — who came to Jerusalem several years ago on a pilgrimage and proceeded to lose her faith there — was conducting us to the delivery room. At first I was astonished to see such a huge hall in a house that size — but soon enough I realized that I was looking at an illusion, for the walls were covered with mirrors cut and swiveled to face each other, while more mirrors surrounded the beds, so that the room — which was lit only by candles — resembled some resplendent grotto. As I stood wondering how we had ever fallen into the clutches of this most mysterious man, who had enticed us from so far away, the midwife brought us a basin of water to wash the dust from our hands and dressed us in hospital smocks. Wherever we looked we saw reflections — ghostly apparitions — images within images…

— Linka was invited to join us. Although she was glowing with wonderment and quite delighted that I had not taken her to some inn, she kept looking anxiously at a woman in childbirth who lay covered by a sheet, a swarthy female who called to mind a lithe wildcat. Her abdomen was soft. Her long, bare legs protruded from the sheet…

— You see, she was remarkably relaxed, Father, and at once I asked myself, what was the cause of her atonicity? I smelled no hypnogenetic agent; her face was alert; yet she lay there utterly tranquil, following us with her coal-black eyes, which seemed unperturbed at the sight of visitors. I could see at once that she had perfect faith in the Swedish midwife, who presided without losing her composure for a moment. Mani did nothing but smile at her quickly through his little beard and signal the midwife with a nod of his head to proceed with the delivery: And yet — are you listening, Father? — he managed to give the impression that had he not come back from Europe in the nick of time, everything would have come to a halt…

— Yes. I can still picture every detail of that screamless birth, which took place on the night of our arrival in a Jerusalem that we had not even seen yet. For the moment we could only scent the city through an open window that let in a most wonderful breeze, on which was wafted a precise compound of cool, dry air and an almost imperceptibly sweet, herbiferous essence — a most carefully concocted extract whereof consists, I submit, the true grandeur of the place. Linka clutched my hand, all but digging her fingernails into it. She was actually shaking. For the first time in her life she was seeing a womb in action — in all those mirrors surrounding her she had more than a glimpse of what would one day be her own fate. The amazing Swede, having felt the next contraction coming even before the woman in labor, whose concentration was broken by our appearance, now leaned low over the bed and forced apart the long, brown legs, lowering her own body between them and thrusting her head toward the womb as if to lap up the blood that was dripping from it. She did not, however, do so; rather, she began to pant with short breaths like a faithful dog that has just run a course; whereupon the woman, slightly lifting her head to look in the mirror in front of her, which reflected the mirror behind her, began to pant too; and kept it up until the Swede stopped, at which exact second she stopped also The Swede threw her a big, happy smile, which turned at once into a suffering grimace; she brought her clenched hands up to her shoulders as if fending off an evil spirit; and at once the woman arched herself like a bow and mimicked her, grimacing and expelling what was in her. The cervix opened a bit more; a thin trickle of blood ran off into the white sheet; you could not have said whose ordeal was greater, the midwife’s or the woman in childbirth’s, for before the woman could groan the midwife had done it before her, panting again like a thirsty yellow dog that was joined at once by its faithful black mate. And mind you, Papa dear, this was doubled and redoubled all around us — behind us, before us, overhead, and underneath — yes, even the tears that glittered in the eyes of Linka, who was enraptured by the mystery of birth, were increased exponentially — if only you and Mama had been there to see how ravishing she looked in her white smock, by the flicker of the candles! She was never more beautiful — she never will be. She held my hand and leaned on Mani, who put an arm around each of us. “There, do you see?” he whispered to us in Hebrew. “It is without pain. Without pain.” We nodded. At that moment we both could have sworn that that Swedish Brunhild took all the pain upon herself…

— So far he had done nothing — nothing, that is, but glance in the mirrors, in which multiple births were taking place, one more curious than the next — and in which you now could see a curly lock of coal-black hair that belonged to a little man-cub — a somber, wizened little thing that had chosen to be born at the very tail end of this old century — that had not wanted to wait for the next one, the unknown twentieth. It slid quickly out of the vagina, which made me think of a mouth that could not stop yawning, silently cheered on by us all. Mani went to a corner; deftly seized a curved, dripping knife from a boiling pot with his forceps; gripped the newborn infant with one hand; held it up; slapped its back to get it to cry; and then — with the most amazing dexterity — cut the umbilical cord, stanched the bleeding, bandaged the wound with a large pad, and plunked the infant sweepingly down into the arms of Linka, who stood there in a daze. You would have thought her the mother and him the father — and I, dearest Papa, felt a shudder go through me, for he had, as it were, by that act, taken her captive…

— No, they were Mohammedans, Father. A tiny, yellowish little Muslim, one of those premature babies you don’t expect to last a week — yet by some miracle it hung on, and on Yom Kippur it was still alive, measuring me with a friendly glance of its little, coal-black eyes…

— No, why? He has Jewesses too. Did you think they are childless there? The very next day a Jewess gave birth to twins — a boy and a girl — and screamed so hard that even the Swede could not calm her.

— But why? You have nothing to worry about. We Jews have our fair share of babies in the Land of Israel too…

— It is an open clinic. That was his way, Father. A multiethnic, syncretistic, ecumenical clinic, which it has to be to survive…

— A human laboratory, ha ha…

— That is one way of looking at it. As for our Linka —

— Now, now, that is putting it a bit strongly. As for our Linka — just imagine her standing there in a penitential-looking white gown, reverently holding the little baby, which meanwhile had stopped crying, and rocking him ecstatically — it just had been born and here she was already trying to put it to sleep! Mani was bent over the afterbirth, rummaging about in it as if searching for another infant, while the mother lay quietly, apparently feeling no need for words. For my own part, I was still groggy from the journey and delighted to be on solid ground, away from tossing waves, clattering trains, and lurching carriages. Our voyage was over; we were in Jerusalem, which could be breathed, if not seen, from the dark window! Dr. Mani called me over to have a look at the afterbirth and explained something in a Hebrew that was no more equal to the task than my own. I nodded somnambulistically, staring at that portly, energetic man who must indeed have been a pied piper to bring us to such a place. The line leading from Jelleny-Szad to Jerusalem was mysterious — inspiring — perhaps impossible — but oddly delicious all the same…

— Perfectly delicious.

— So I felt.

— Delicious.

— Pardon me…

— His children? How strange that you should ask about them, because suddenly there they were: they had stolen unnoticed into the unguarded delivery room, because news had reached them in the synagogue of their father’s return and they had run all the way home. For a moment it seemed that the room was full of children. And yet there were but two of them, a brother and sister, multiplied many times over by the phantasmagorical mirrors. The girl was about ten, a squat, graceless child with two short, sad-looking braids and lazy, cowlike eyes; her brother was slightly older, every bit a little Mani, although not at all like his father — a thin, somber boy in a black suit and little fez with the face of an old man. He studied us strangers carefully, impatient to be alone with his father, who was deftly stitching up the patient while joking with Linka, in whose arms the baby was already fast asleep. The midwife made a move to drive the children out; only the girl, however, let herself be driven; at once the boy slipped back in like a little snake, a hurt, querulous look on his face. Soon his mother appeared too. It was easy to see whom the children had gotten their cheerlessness from and why the doctor was given to travel and having guests in his house. She was a docile woman with a chronic eye condition who spoke only Spanish — and at once I was alert to the danger, because this was not a strong family that could override an outside love but quite the opposite, one that could only inflame it. No matter how suspiciously the boy stood guard, he was too young to be an obstacle, while I–I was powerless — I was still sleepwalking from the journey and balmy with the air of Jerusalem, which I sipped like fine wine — let alone scared to death of sailing back over the waves. Yes, there was a danger, Papa dear, of being engulfed in that city, which — rather than cure us once and for all of our romantic notions — threatened to suck us down into it until you and Mama would be forced to come after us — to sell the mill, lease the forests, find someone for the house, and let go all the help…

— You do?

— Papa, you are wonderful! You honestly would sell everything? You are a man of ideals — a true Zionist — and a most innocent soul…

— Because you are, Papa. Half shrewd businessman and half dreamer. Here, let me give you a kiss…

— No, please! I have not given you a real kiss since coming home…

— Wait — I’m sorry — I did not mean to be rough…

— I will not break your glasses… here… one minute, old man…

— But I did not mean to hurt you. All of a sudden you began to pull away…

— I’m sorry, I truly am. It’s all right…

— It was not insanely. It was lovingly!

— I am sorry…

— You are right, I have changed… What time is it?

— No — wait — do not leave me — look, the birth is already over. The bloody pads have been collected and the Swedish midwife has weighed the baby, handed it to its mother, and ushered in the father to see the new soul he has brought into the world — which, if it takes good care of itself, may live to see the tail end of the next century… This Arab was a man of few words. He looked at his wife, patted her cheek, went back out to untie his donkey, and rode off in the night to his village to get more wives with child.

— Four, I am told.

— No more than four.

— That is the maximum.

— The devil knows. I suppose they fine him — or confiscate the fifth — how should I know? A man who has not even one wife is not the right person to ask.

— No, he lived upstairs. And unlike the clinic, which was quite elaborate and spotlessly clean, the apartment was small and dingy, with an air of poverty about it. The place was poorly lit and full of shadows, and had a central dining room surrounded by little bedrooms piled high with odds and ends and linens. In it was a dinner getting cold because of the prolonged birth — indeed, I could tell by the number of settings on the table that Mani was unexpected too, to say nothing of his guests. By now I regretted not having listened to Linka and gone off to some inn. “I was wrong,” I confessed in a whisper, “terribly wrong — why don’t we leave right this minute?” But she hushed me at once, still burning with excitement over the birth that had possessed her whole being. “We mustn’t embarrass him,” she said. “He’s a sensitive man.” And so we stayed, hesitantly but hungrily led to the table to partake of a meal that was never intended for us. At the table’s far end a personage was waiting to meet us. She was Mani’s mother, a stately but almost blind woman dressed in black like the Greek peasants I had seen on Crete, who are already in mourning even before anyone has died. Mani hugged her with great fervor, kissed her hand, and introduced her to Linka and me in a Spanish mixed with Arabic. Once more I could see that I was being made out to be a specialist of worldwide repute — and once more he did not neglect to mispronounce Jelleny-Szad. The candles threw flickering shapes on the walls of the dark apartment, and once more I modestly inclined my head to acknowledge the honor accorded me in Jerusalem, taking the stately senora’s shriveled hand in my own while she lavishly welcomed me with a radiance that shone through her blindness. This made Linka so jealous that she stepped forward and seized the soft hand too, kissing it devoutly and presenting herself. Sensing the passionateness of the soul that was seeking to take her by storm, the old woman rose and laid a hand on Linka’s head to bless her. Nor, so it seemed, would she have released her had not little Mani, having removed his fez and jacket and become a small boy again, elbowed his way between them…

— Only a mother. Dr. Mani never knew his father. He did not even possess a photograph of him. The man died before his son was born, killed in a brawl in an alleyway in the old city. It was Mani’s grandfather, his father’s father, who — having come especially from Salonika to be with the young couple for the birth — took care of the widow in the first months. And yet instead of taking his grandson and daughter-in-law back to Greece with him, Grandfather Mani chose to leave them in Jerusalem and to return home by himself. Mani never knew him, nor anyone else in his family. He was raised entirely by his mother, a pampered and much-loved only son. These were all things I had already heard at sea, when he and Linka had sat up nights by my bed, ministering to my seasick soul while telling each other stories of their childhoods.

— Ones I had never heard before. Maybe she got them from Mama, or from Grandmother… or else she simply made them up…

— For example… for example… no, Father, this is not the time for it. You still do not grasp that this story is not about us; it is about him — that Sephardic gynecologist — that soft, cunningly naive man who for years was possessed by a passion for self-murder that he concealed so as to scare no one away — whose consummation he put off to heighten the pleasure of choosing the pretext he would use…

— Wait… First comes the dinner that we crashed, which was by no means a large one but rather an assortment of side dishes — apples, cooked vegetables, pomegranates, bits of fried brain — each little more than a symbol — each a wish — a buffer against fear — a warning to enemies — a desire — a fantasy. None were capable of satisfying — all only made you hungrier. And thus we sat, hardly speaking, Linka and I, listening to the unfamiliar holiday melodies that warbled on and on while saying an occasional “amen” and swallowing symbols — and all this, of course, in five different languages, which the darkness and our own weariness seemed to combine into one.

— Linka and I spoke in Yiddish; the Manis spoke Spanish; Linka and Mani used English; with Mani’s wife we tried French; and everything came in a wrapping of Hebrew.

— Mani’s wife knows some French. Linka tried talking with her to gauge the extent of her defeat.

— She had been sapped by her husband’s fantasies — and being somewhat older than he was, she did not sense the threat that had arrived from abroad, neither then nor in the days that followed. She made no effort to follow our talk. She sat there listening as though to an inner drone in her own soul — and indeed, Linka and I must have seemed mere children to her, slightly older than her own, no doubt — why, we had even finished our schooling! — but children nonetheless, perhaps orphans of some sort who had been entrusted to her husband in Basel as his wards — the proof being that, when it was time to find us a place to sleep, she proposed putting us both in her children’s beds, which were in an alcove next to her bedroom. Mani whispered in her ear — Linka and I murmured something or other — and a better solution was found: the girl was moved to the grandmother’s bed, Linka was put in the children’s room, and young Mani was sent to sleep with me in the clinic. The Swedish midwife was instructed to surround us with partitions and to screen us off from each other.

— Of course. It was a great mistake, Father. We should have gone to a hotel, especially since I had invaded the privacy of that dark, crowded house with its unattractive furnishings quite enough. But now it was Linka who wanted to live on the inside; she was ecstatic with the knowledge that she could go below when she pleased to watch a new birth; and without giving it another thought, she went straight to the children’s room, changed into her nightclothes, and climbed into one of the two beds. Shortly after, the rest of the household drifted off to its rooms too, leaving me alone at the dinner table to cut furtive slices of the remaining hallah, since I was as hungry at the end of that symbolic meal as I had been when it started. I heard Mani climbing the stairs, no doubt thrilled by the thought that his latest love had become a little girl who slept on the other side of the wall from him I did not wait for him but went in to see her and found her in bed, glowing, her eyes wide open, a large, colorful Turkish doll — a sort of belly dancer in silk pants — above her head, on which she wore a Turkish fez in place of a bonnet. “Forgive me, Linka,” I said to her. “I was wrong — tomorrow we will find other lodgings and move out of here.” She sat bolt upright. She was already burned by the Palestinian sun. “But there’s no need,” she murmured. “It’s not that at all. There is lots of room here — we must not hurt his feelings — he cares for us dearly. I’m telling you, I know — let him play the host.” I said nothing. I could feel her inner tumult, her new hope that had sprung from seeing his wife and children for herself. I sat down on her bed and tried to say something solemn — something about our journey having come to an end — but could not think of the words. “Well, then,” I said, “here we are in Jerusalem at last.” “Yes,” she replied at once. “Here we are. How happy I am!” It was the most simple, the most touching declaration — all the more so for having been made in that down-at-the-heels little room, surrounded by a confusion of children’s things — for having been so perfectly forthright. “How happy I am!” I smiled at her indulgently. I knew that her happiness had nothing to do with Jerusalem — of which she had so far seen nothing — and everything to do with something else; it was no more than an amusing illusion, I thought, that would soon come to naught. “And you, Efrayim?” she asked earnestly, too big for that child’s bed that was gazed down on by the Turkish doll. “Are you happy?” I laughed. “Happy? As if happiness were possible for me — as if there ever has been a time when I was happy. Happy for what? For that premature baby? For being here? We have nine days to see this place and then we had better get ourselves safely home, because I promised Mama and Papa to return you in no worse condition than I took you in.” She frowned at that. “Of course, of course,” she murmured short-temperedly, “we shall see.” I had the feeling that she was listening to something outside the door — to our host, Dr. Mani, who was standing there eavesdropping — portlier than ever in an open shirt, minus his jacket and tie — waiting bleary-eyed to take me down to my quarters, where the indefatigable midwife had made my bed. She had washed and changed clothes too, and she greeted me affably in bare feet and showed me to my bed, which was set apart from the women’s beds but not by much, as if some obscure formula had determined its position vis-a-vis them. Next to it, behind a partition, was little Mani, who had not yet settled down for the night; he was standing on his bed in a black shift, the sort of tunic that Arab children run about in, and now he ran to his father unrestrainedly, pulling him away from me and behind his partition, where he clung to him with both arms. I could hear him scolding him in that Spanish of theirs, which is rather like a watered-down Latin. Here he had been waiting long months for him, pining away — and what does the man do when he finally comes home but show up with two monopolizing strangers! I could sense the doctor’s impatience; his answers were brusque, for he wished only to be upstairs again, in the little room where his new daughter was lying. It was then, without warning, that the boy broke out crying bitterly, in a dry, harsh sob that raided the silence in the clinic. It was an inconsolable sound. I rose and went over to him — he stopped crying and hung his head angrily — and so I turned to Mani and chided him for forgetting the most important thing of all. The black horse! “You see,” I said to the boy, “your father wished to bring you a horse.” At first he would not listen but merely pressed his nose against the wall and waited for me to go away, only half-understanding my Polish Hebrew. Little by little, however, the story enchanted him; he began peeking over his shoulder to watch me describe with my hands how the gray sack was tied around the horse’s head, and how it was eased into the hold of the ship, and how it behaved so wildly there that it had to be disembarked in Crete and galloped off to the freedom of the mountains. The boy’s tears dried; he was listening intently now, asking his father the meaning of words that eluded him; at last, his sorrow once more got the best of him. “But where is that island?” he asked, quite desolate to think that the horse was in Crete when it might have been in Jerusalem. “Can’t we go there and bring it back?” he begged. Mani translated for me, and I promised that on our way home we would ransom the horse from the island and send it to Palestine. That gradually calmed the boy down enough to go to bed. A prematurely old little child!

— Yosef was his name. Since Beirut a day has not passed without my thinking of him. Even here, in this dark corner — in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from Jerusalem — I feel a physical pain when I mention him, as if I had been shot. Does he know yet that his father is dead? And what else does he know? I picture him roaming past the mirrors and partitions of the clinic, which must be slowly going to pot, hating and blaming Linka, but also me. Is he capable of making a distinction between us? Will he ever understand that we were only an instrument in his father’s hands, a wretched pretext for a profound passion that I must fumblingly grope to comprehend for the rest of my life — that we too were the victims of…

— Go back where?

— When? How?

— What, all over again?

— No, no. I have already been there — I have had enough — it is someone else’s turn…

— But what? In what language? What could I write? What could I say that would not make his anguish only worse?

— No, Father, no. It is a bad idea.

— Money? What kind of money?

— For what? It would be an implicit admission of guilt… why should I make it?

— But what guilt? What are you talking about, Father? I ask you: what? You have taken leave of your senses! What guilt?

— No, wait — wait — don’t leave me, Father. Father… wait — wait — I beg you — don’t leave me to toss and turn in bed all night as I did that first night in Jerusalem — a Jerusalem I already was in and had not even entered yet. All I had seen of it was that lone, amazing clinic and the stars in its sky — which nevertheless were enough to make me realize that I too — but why should I not be? — was almost happy, even if I would never have admitted it to Linka — happy that the earth was not rocking beneath me and that I could turn my thoughts away from my heaving insides and back to the world again — to the voices I now heard — to the quiet steps and whispers above me — to the soft, barefoot movements of the Swedish midwife — who, it seemed, never slept — as she made the rounds of her sleeping prepartums to see which of them would be next. I lay there for a while like a doctor on night duty; rose to ask the Swede for a stethoscope to listen to the newborn baby’s heart; returned to my bed; gazed out the window at the fading stars while watching the darkness slowly lift; and listened to the unexpected sounds of the dawn — at first the sweet ring of a church bell, as if the little church of St. Jodwiga of Oświ[ecedil]cim. had followed us to Jerusalem, and then, close on its heels, the clear voices of the muezzins…

— Those are the Mohammedan cantors who call the faithful to prayer. And although I was no Mohammedan, I jumped at once from my bed with the realization that — even if it was more heard than seen — dawn was breaking. I washed my face, feeling very hungry, and made up my mind to discover Jerusalem on my own and get to know it for myself rather than as a hostage of my doctor, whose intentions had begun to seem even more nefarious since crossing the threshold of his house. I stepped outside into broad daylight, pointed myself in the direction of some sounds that I heard, and struck out across the fields, passing some little house now and then until I arrived at the gray ramparts of the city and disappeared through a gate into its narrow streets. From that morning on, I walked the old city’s streets every day, my feet skipped along by its cobblestones. It was a city that from the very first I understood perfectly — which is more than I can say of any of your other Jews, Zionists or not. I was there.

— I was. And I got to know that stone womb that is the mother of us all.

— No, not so much the inhabitants. Jews are the same everywhere. The only difference is that there the Mohammedans take the place of the Poles; the Turks — of the Austrians; the donkeys — of the horses; and the nimble black goats — of the hogs. Sometimes, with their little beards, they made me think that they were ancient Jews who had disguised and shrunk themselves after the destruction of the Temple in order to stay on in Jerusalem…

— I wandered from place to place, footloose and missing nothing, thoroughly learning the city, in which the distances are astonishingly small. From our Wailing Wall to the great mosque with its two domes is no more than a few steps; from there a short walk will bring you to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and not far from that are the synagogues and the holy places of the Armenians, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Protestants. Everything is jumbled together — it is a bit like entering a large shop for religious artifacts whose shelves are piled high — the believer can choose whatever catches his fancy…

— It is quite simple. You walk down a street that is no more than a few feet wide and there it is — a large wall — or buttress — however you wish to call it — grayish and covered with mosses. It is quite amazingly like the photograph you have hung on the wall of your office, Father. Perhaps the same Jews even pray there. I found it most appealing, Papa dear.

— Its formal simplicity — its improvised originality — its refusal to make any false promises or foster any illusions. It is a last stop of history, no less than that board in the train station — a blank wall with no open-sesames or hidden crypts. What more can I tell you, Father? What else? It is perhaps the ultimate dam, built to hold back the Jews in their restless proclivity to return to their past. “Halt!” it says. “No Passage Allowed Beyond This Point.”

— Only at first. I won’t deny that I stood there dismayed for a moment — even stunned — gawking in disappointment. But soon enough I got over it, stepped up to the large, cool stones, and — ha ha ha — even kissed them, would you believe it? A lazy atheist like myself ardently kissing not just one stone but two! The Jews and Jewesses praying there saw that my head was uncovered and sought to comment but did not; and so I tarried for a while, thinking of this and that, until I stopped an Arab boy carrying a tray of golden little loaves and bought them all for a thaler. I stood there eating one after another — they were wonderfully tasty — I shall never forget the taste of them. From that moment on — as if I had chewed the stones and they were made of dough — my memories of the Wailing Wall do not come without the fragrant taste of freshly baked bread…

— A narrow lane. The approach is dark and dank, very intimate. On one side of you is the ancient, holy relic with its huge stones, and on the other, a cluster of homes with flapping laundry and crying babies. It is an impossible but quite real combination. I would have lingered there longer had not the ram’s horns begun wailing all around me, which made me think of you in the gray fields of Poland, waiting for some sign of life from us. I was directed to the sarwiyya, the Turkish governor’s house in the Christian Quarter, and from there I sent you my second telegram — the one that Mama says only made you even more worried. But why?

— But what did it say, for goodness’ sake?

— What was unclear about it? I was even given a Turkish telegraph operator who knew German, and we made up the message together. I remember it word for word: We are well. Will start home after Yom Kippur.

— We are happy?

— But I expressly wrote “well”! Who could have changed it to “happy”? Perhaps it was that Turk’s own idea. But even if it said that, why be so alarmed by it?

— What do you mean, that was all?

— Let me see it. This is what you received?

— But the last words are left out. I paid good money for them — that postal clerk made off with them! Unless they fell out of the wires along the way — or else the Poles were too lazy to copy them…

— How do you know?

— I had no idea you could do that.

— And when you traced it back to its point of origin, what were you told?

— They confirmed it? But how could they have? What a scoundrel! Why, I paid for every word of it…

— Two piastres.

— Of course. I would never have kept you in the dark like that, without even letting you know…

— What a devilish business — he went and shortened it on his own! And he thought my visit in Jerusalem was too short — he could not stop telling me about the wonders of the city…

— But…

— My dears — you had every reason to worry — We are happy — an odd telegram indeed! A person might have thought… oh, my poor loves… and yet even then…

— The word “happy”?

— So it could have, Papa dear. Taken captive by our own happiness… a wonderfully subtle thought. Bravo!

— Indeed, he was our captor, that oriental gynecologist. There was a power in him — he could move you to do anything by his presence, as confusedly soft as it was — as full of surprises too, disappearing and appearing without warning. I had already noticed how he worked his will with his family — even the boy, who sought to fight back, was constantly squelched. The Swede was all but enslaved to him, and I had seen for myself how Linka trembled all over when he flung that gory infant into her arms, thrusting upon her — a stranger from afar — a most intimate partnership. How could I have known that his effusive — his soft, imaginative, and prankish nature — was unreal — unnatural — nothing but an illusory reflection, like those of the swiveled mirrors in his clinic — of the soon-to-surface destructiveness within him?

— Yes. There was even a danger of Linka’s being ensnared to work for him as a nurse, to turn herself into a nurse-concubine…

— There is nothing insane about it…

— It is not a perverse thought. Nothing was impossible by then. Why, I myself had begun to feel that morning a well-being as blissful as nirvana, a primitive, tidal oneness with that diaphanous light. I wandered among the bright colors of the fruit stands, the rug dealers, the coppersmiths, accompanied by the savage wails — now rising, now choking — of the ram’s horns, in seventh heaven to be on solid ground, so brimful with happiness that the telegraph clerk who saw it decided to rewrite my cable without a date of departure, which made you here — holding the innocent gray telegram in your hands thousands of miles from Jerusalem — instantly alert to the threat that was implicit in the elimination of those words that never reached you. Is that not wondrous?

— Yes, dearest Papa, a threat — the threat of happiness — that is a threat too. And so I knew that if I wished to remain in Jerusalem as a pilgrim and nothing more, albeit a most secular one, my first task was to distance myself from Dr. Mani and his harem and to find lodgings of my own, preferably in a pilgrims’ hostel. It did not take long to ascertain that there were indeed such places everywhere, little hospices that offered bed-and-breakfast, and since I inquired after one run by Englishmen, who Mani believed spoke the language of the future, I was directed to a place near the Jaffa Gate called Christ’s Church, which combined a hostel with a biblical seminary. Its director was a handsome, ruddy-cheeked Scotch priest who saw at once that I was neither an Englishman, a pilgrim, nor anything resembling either, but a plain ordinary Galician Jew in need of a room, which made him regard me benevolently and usher me into an inner courtyard off the chapel, where he showed me a dark chamber that looked out on a green ravine and had a single bed. I did not ask for a second bed or for a partition, because I knew that one word about bringing a sister would suffice to get me thrown out at once.

— So I thought. I was so thrilled by the room and the hostel that I threw my hat on the bed to take possession of it and returned to the Manis’ via some dusty footpaths that ran by a few small Jewish neighborhoods, plucking an aromatic leaf now and then from a bush by the roadside and leaping over the rocks in the way…

— Here and there I passed a building — a street — the start of some new neighborhood — a school — a hospital — a hostel — a sanatorium. Outside the old walls, Jerusalem is still a collection of uncollated ideas, of the private whims of individuals who have picked out some hillside and hatched their thoughts upon it. As of yet, however, no two thoughts have coalesced; there are not even any roads to connect them, just the trails beaten by persevering hikers. And thus, thirsty and dehydrated — for I had lost my way once or twice, there being no sounds to navigate by — there being nothing, in fact, but the profound silence of a holiday morning — I arrived back at the house I had left early in the day. It was deserted. The Swedish midwife suggested that I try the Bukharian synagogue, in which, she said, the service would soon be over — and indeed, as I approached it the worshipers came pouring out, among them Dr. Mani, who looked like a positive eminence with his large prayer shawl bag under his arm. He was slowly steering his little blind mother, surrounded by a crowd of people and assisted by Linka while his daughter walked alongside them; his son, dressed in black as usual, was trailing a few steps behind, alone by himself like the catchword at the bottom of a page that is waiting for a hand to turn it so that it can begin the new page.

— Yes, our Linka too. Just think of it — she, who cannot be gotten out of bed on a weekday before midmorning, let alone on a Sabbath or holiday, had risen at the crack of dawn to accompany the doctor to services, the long hours of which she had loyally sat through in the woman’s section of the synagogue with Mani’s mother and some other old women, a black kerchief covering her head, listening dubiously but not without pleasure to the Sephardic melodies, which do not whine up and down like ours but have a merry beat. Perhaps they derive from Turkish marches played during the Balkan campaigns.

— She sat patiently through it all, her prayer book in her lap. And now, in the courtyard of the synagogue, she was reaping her reward, because Mani was arranging her debut. He was making an odd fuss over her too, treating her like a grande dame and stopping to tip his hat to all his friends and neighbors while presenting her as the rarest of pearls. And of course, she played the part to the hilt, curtsying daintily and holding out a royal hand. People were drawn to her. He was more than twice her age — and yet — he behaved to her with great deference, so that — when I think of the two of them now, standing there in the noonday heat — I am shocked by my own blindness…

— Because — without a doubt — he had already then made up his mind to take his own life on account of her. That is why she was so precious to him, of such inestimable value. It was not for her own sake. It was for the sake of the horrible end that he had decided to make her the reason for. And the value thus conferred on her only spurred him on in his despair and passion for self-destruction, so that this end — the ruin he meant to bring upon himself — illuminated her also — coiled itself around her — insinuated its way into her — until her face became tragic too — a tragedy, Father — Father! — that was even greater — more terrible — than that which was to befall — that did befall! — Mani himself. And this made her more important than ever, although not so much in her own right, because the importance came from beyond her, so that she was no longer just our Linka — not just a plumpish, giggly twenty-year-old with flashing eyes from a place called Jelleny-Szad — but the deputy — the emissary — of innumerable women — some with child and some not — some mothers and some seeking to be — but all incomparably riper and more beautiful than she was — a long, long line of women ranged behind her — whom our tubby, good-hearted gynecologist was doing everything in his power to find room for in himself — was determined to redeem by means of those tragic, grotesque mirrors he had put in all the rooms of his clinic — was seeking to conjure through the medium of a red-haired young lady who happened to attend the Third Zionist Congress…

— I am, am I? You are perspicuous, Father. I was already raving then under those blue, torrid skies of a summer’s end that was hotter than any summer. My shoes were caked with dust, and I was full of my morning’s impressions from the walled city and wanted only to rest in perfect peace — which Dr. Mani would not let me do. “Why, it’s Dr. Shapiro,” he cried out, hastening to introduce me to the departing worshipers. “He is a children’s physician from the Hapsburg Empire who has come from the congress to study the methods of my clinic.” I bent to kiss the hand of his delicate mother — who, I had noticed, was partial to Polish kisses; patted the girl on the head; tipped my own hat too; and betook myself to Mani’s house, from which came a sound of loud groans. Two Hasidic Jews were waiting for the doctor by the cistern in the courtyard. They greeted him and rushed him off to the clinic — and meanwhile, in a wicker basket in the courtyard, I came upon the previous night’s baby, utterly naked and soaking up the sunshine, which — so Mani claimed — was just the thing to dissolve the hepatitic cells in its blood. Without bothering to look for a stethoscope, I crouched and put my ear to its chest — it was breathing quite energetically…

— No, Father, I did not participate in that day’s birth, nor in any others. I had come to Jerusalem to be a tourist and an observer, not to deliver babies. I went to bed and had a long, sweet sleep, and that evening, when the Sabbath was over, I told Linka about my move to Christ’s Church. I did not propose that she join me. “You were right,” I said. “It is best that you stay here to avoid any injury to his feelings Take a holiday from me and have many happy birth-days, so that — when your turn comes — you will know how to do it gladly and without pain.” At first my moving out so resolutely gave her a fright. Yet I knew that only by distancing myself in such a way could I eventually muster the strength to break the chains of his captivity…

— He was holding us captive, Father, without our knowing it…

— No. That evening they all helped me move — Mani, his children, Linka of course, and even the Swede, who came along for “a breath of fresh air.” Everyone carried some bundle of mine and we proceeded to the Jaffa Gate, where I took them all up to my room. We opened the window for a view of the Russian church with its onion domes and then went downstairs to that Anglican study house for a cup of tea with the men of the cloth, who were delighted with my escorts’ English. After that, I took Linka to see the Wailing Wall. She faced it in aloof silence. “What,” I asked, “will you not even give it one little kiss? This morning I gave it two.” But she would not. And so we parted. I had given her her freedom.

— No. Of course we saw each other afterward. But I had given her her freedom — for the first time — and she knew it.

— I mean that you have always complained that I hound her — that I interfere — that I do not mind my own business — that I try to influence her. And so I gave her her freedom…

— The words speak for themselves.

— The entire ten days in that children’s room next to the parents’ bedroom, with the Turkish doll in the fez pirouetting over her.

— Who?

— Ah, the girl. She slept in the grandmother’s big bed.

— In the clinic, behind a partition.

— I do not know.

— Perhaps…

— Occasionally.

— Perhaps… I have no way of knowing… I was a good several versts away.

— The room had to be paid for, of course. Apart from Englishmen and pilgrims, only Christ himself is allowed to stay there free of charge…

— Half a pound sterling per diem.

— Exactly a thaler.

— No, it was not cheap. But I was treated nobly; no effort was spared to make me comfortable. And their whiskey, Papa — it is unparalleled — a most mellow, a divinely inspired brew.

— The city, Papa. The city itself.

— No, not the inhabitants. The city is forever greater than its inhabitants. I plunged into it as deeply as I could — I roamed all about and around it, exploring it layer by layer — because I knew that I would never be back.

— Heavens, no, Father; I am not anti-Jerusalem; I am a-Jerusalem. After all, suppose there were no Jerusalem? I have freed myself — but with no illusions — from the dream that you will all continue to stumble about in, lost between imagination and reality — between accusation and guilt — between the fear to go on and the fear to stay put; angered by your hopeless entanglement. I have taken the honorable way out; I know what I am leaving behind…

— I wandered.

— In the narrow streets — the souks — the courtyards. Inside and outside the walls…

— I was not always alone. When Mani saw that the city interested me, he and Linka sometimes joined me. And being eager to present us and publicize his return home, he invited us all to high tea at the home of the British consul, whom he appeared to regard as his patron. Everyone there was quite taken with Linka’s lilting English. Another time, we startled the Turkish pasha one morning with a surprise visit, at which we were served coffee too bitter for words. At the Armenian patriarch’s, on the other hand, we spent an evening sipping chilled wine. And one day Mani hired a private carriage in which he put his mother, his two children, Linka, and me, and took us to a Mohammedan village on a slope outside Jerusalem. We went to see a sheikh of sorts, a venerable old friend of the family, who apparently knew Mani’s father and grandfather; Mani visited him every year during the autumn holidays. We were ushered into a large room where the old sheikh was seated on a cushion in front of a splendid wall carpet with a dagger thrust into it. He was surrounded by the members of his household, most of them rheumy-eyed with disease. Venerable though he was, he was thrilled by our visit and appeared to be a fervent admirer of Mani’s mother; he bowed his head when she spoke to him and chose fruit for her from a tray set before him and laid it on her plate — figs, apples, and bunches of grapes that he pressed on her so attentively that I almost thought he was about to put them in her mouth with his own palsied hands. He was also delighted to be introduced to the two of us; he addressed Linka as “Madame Mani,” being under the impression that Mani had taken a second wife, and immediately put a cluster of grapes on her plate too. His family took a great interest in me and wanted to know if I was a settler in Jerusalem or merely a tourist. Mani, who acted as our interpreter, began, I believe, to explain that I was touring with an eye to settling, but I cut him short at once with a wave of my hand and a word I had learned in the streets of the walled city: hallass — which means, “That will do.” They were so greatly pleased with it that they all laughed and repeated it after me —“hallass, hallass!”—while Mani looked quite crestfallen. In the carriage on the way back I felt for the first time his anxiety over our coming departure. All of a sudden he said in low tones, “Perhaps, after all, you will stay on through the holidays to see a Palestinian autumn.”

— Autumn.

— He was simply casting about for something. But I had made up my mind not to remain a day longer, even though the better I got to know the city, the more it grew on me. He noticed how it intrigued me and sometimes sent his son along with me as my guide. Perhaps too, he just wanted the boy out of the house. On the last days of our stay I would rise in late morning, descend to the quiet chapel below, and be met there by young Mani, who had a way of appearing all at once from behind the baptismal font or the altar. Sometimes I found him standing and preaching to himself, his old man’s features passionate with anger.

— Hebrew, even though my pronunciation made him jeer, so that I constantly had to correct it to keep him from regarding my speech as a foreign and incomprehensible language. Still, he was a pleasant walking companion, with a quick, light stride and no end of ideas where to take me. In my last days there, we ventured increasingly beyond the walls; to the Mount of Olives, for example, which has no olives but large quantities of graves. We would stand there among the flocks of black goats, looking out for a long while at the city, and then head down past St. Elizaveta’s, which he called the Church of Onions, and across the Hill of Evil Counsel to the Russian Compound. Everywhere, I noticed, he sought to befriend the Turkish soldiers; he invariably headed in the direction of their posts, waving to them when he saw them and calling out a few Turkish words. And everywhere too, I had the same feeling of cosmic space; “I am freeing myself of this city forever,” I told myself, as I followed the boy back down amid the walls, through the narrow streets and courts of the souk, “without illusion or resentment.” I was no longer an unknown stranger in Jerusalem; the same Jewish and Arab peddlers who had eyed me wordlessly a few days before now stopped me to greet me. It was then that I knew that our journey had come to its true end.

— Linka was still enthralled by the clinic. She spent her time helping Mani and the midwife. Sometimes, lying in bed at night in Christ’s Church, she seemed as distant from me as if I were in Cracow and she in Jelleny-Szad.

— No. I did not spend Yom Kippur by myself. It began with their convincing me to join them for the meal before the fast. At the table, when we were done eating, Mani turned to me directly and demanded that we postpone our trip. At first I did not give a straight answer; finally, though, I said, “I must get back to my patients.” I could not for the life of me, however, think of who they were, except for little Antony, whom I play checkers with after each examination.

— Why, yes, there is Szimek too. How could I have forgotten Szimek? How is he?

— Really? Oh, my! Szimek…

— Yes.

— Tomorrow…

— My goodness, Szimek… But where was I? Ah, yes: at the meal before the fast. He kept pressing me to stay while I pleaded my patients and Linka kept silent. That was when he let the cat out of the bag. Why, he suggested, did I not return home by myself and let Linka stay on through the autumn, or even until spring, when he would bring her back to Europe — to Venice, or perhaps even all the way to Jelleny-Szad? You could have heard a pin drop. Linka turned red. The boy bit his lips. Mani’s old mother questioningly turned her blind, groping eyes toward us. I weighed my words carefully. “Linka,” I said, “is indeed no longer a child and is free to lead her own life. But I am obliged to bring her back to her father and mother. Once that is done, she can of course go anywhere she wishes.” I saw her start to protest and restrain herself. The old grandmother swiveled her head to divine the shadows at the table while Mani’s wife rose to clear the dishes, shifting her glance from her shamefacedly love-stricken husband to Linka, the overgrown girl brought home from Europe who had managed to become a young woman within the space of several days… Just then we heard a strange, harsh scream from below, followed by the frightened cry of the midwife. Mani jumped to his feet with Linka and I right behind him, for it was clear that this was no labor pain but something far worse. Quite firmly, however, he told us not to follow him; he would see to the matter himself; we should finish our meal, he said, and go to synagogue. And so he went below and we continued eating in silence until Linka turned to me furiously and said — in Polish rather than Yiddish — “What do you mean, you are obliged to bring me back?” “But I am,” I answered her quietly. “Not so much to Papa as to Mama, who is very ill. Now let us go pray for her.” I rose, thanked Mani’s wife for the meal, and asked the boy to take us to synagogue.

— Why did I do what?

— It was not to alarm her. It was to bring her to her senses.

— She would never have come back otherwise, Papa… never…

— Why alarm anyone? But the fact is… well, no matter…

— No.

— No matter.

— I said, no matter. We went to their synagogue. There were candles burning everywhere, and it looked like a mosque with all its carpets and cushioned benches along the walls. The boy led me to his father’s seat and I was given a prayer shawl and wrapped in it, because the Sephardic men wear prayer shawls even before they are married. And so I abandoned myself to their merry hymns, which trot along at a cheerful clip without any whining arpeggios, only to look up halfway through the service and see Mani at my side, in his prayer shawl with bloodstains on his fingernails. “The baby died and I don’t know why,” he whispered to me morosely. I felt I should say something; but before I could, he added, “It wasn’t the cord.” After that he was silent except for joining his voice to the cantor’s now and then in some hymn or tune. And so the prayer dragged on into the night.

— Nor can I.

— I could not get away. We returned together across the empty fields, walking slowly with the boy trailing as usual behind us like a catchword awaiting the next page. In front of the clinic two men in work clothes were waiting for us, Jewish farmhands from somewhere outside Jerusalem. Within, in the big room, which was lit only by faint moonlight, we saw the woman lying with her face toward the wall; her husband leaned over her, trying to get her to look at him. Mani walked by them without stopping; he handed his prayer shawl bag to the midwife and led me by the hand to see the dead child in the delivery room. It was lying on a small table in the corner, wrapped in a folded bath towel — a little blue baby girl, perfectly formed, her eyes shut as though fast asleep. Mani picked her up and shook her, slapping her back as if still expecting a cry, and laid her so carefully down on a bed that you might have thought he hoped there was another baby inside her that might yet be born alive. He asked if I remembered my pathology. I nodded. Well, then, he said, why don’t we do an autopsy to establish the cause of death? Although I tried to talk him out of it, he had already seized a scalpel — he was that frantic to find out — and begun looking for a place for the incision when a sound from behind a curtain made him stop. We went to have a look and found the boy hiding there — but before we could shoo him out the door, this was blocked by the father of the dead baby, who wanted the body, since his friends had come to take him and his wife back to their farm. Mani made an effort to dissuade him; thought better of it, wrapped the baby up again; and handed it, looking like a big, sleeping bird, reluctantly over… I hitched a ride with the farmhands on their wagon, grieving with them in silence; near the Lions’ Gate they let me off and I slipped through the wall not far from the big mosque. There was not a sound. The streets were deserted. I had to cross the entire walled city to the Tower of David, and I tried to bolster my spirits by singing one of those Sephardic prayers that resembled an army march. I could not get the melody right, though — and all this time I was haunted by a vision of that dead baby lying in the bed. Besides which, I had a new worry now… are you listening, Father?

— Linka.

— I was so anxious that I awoke early the next morning, quite unable to spend Yom Kippur holed up in Christ’s Church as I had planned. And so back I went to the Manis’, hungry and thirsty, forced to partake in a fast that had imposed itself on me against my will. The house was empty. There was not a soul there, not even the midwife, who had gone to synagogue too. The kitchen was cold and the fire was out in the cookstove. I hurried off to the synagogue — and what did I meet on my way but a carriage, out of which climbed Mani with his doctor’s bag, looking a wreck. He was returning, it seemed, from a vigil with a patient that had not gone well. We entered the synagogue together to find the congregation in the middle of the service, the military marches having yielded to heartbreakingly sad melodies. As we took our seats and joined the prayer, I made out Linka behind a white curtain in the woman’s gallery; she was sitting perfectly still beneath her black kerchief with Mani’s wife, his daughter, and the Swede, who was off in a corner beneath a large window ablaze with that Jerusalem light that had been an object of my contemplation since arriving in the city. It was only on that final day, however, during the Yom Kippur service, when there was nothing to do for long hours but look at it, that I began, I believe, to understand it…

— It is a light, Father, in which two different lights contend, a tawny, free-flowing one from the desert and a bluish one born from the sea that slowly ascends the mountains, gathering the light of the rocks and the olive trees on its way. They meet in Jerusalem — imbibe each other there — subsume each other there — and conjoin at evening into a clear, winy glow that settles through the treetops branch by branch and turns to a coppery red, which — reaching the tip of the window — inspires the worshipers to leap to their feet and bellow the closing prayer in a great wave of supplication that washes over the frozen world. Meanwhile, Mani was seeking to outdo the cantor — to outsing him — to outshout him — while little Mani and all the children joined in with loud cries, working themselves up to a fever pitch that abated only with the sounding of the ram’s horn — which made me most happy, because I knew that as of that moment my homeward journey had begun. Are you listening?

— The prayer ended and large watermelons were carried into the synagogue and sliced and handed out to the worshipers to assuage their thirst. In the courtyard outside we met the womenfolk and wished one another a good year, after which we started slowly home, where we had a light dinner that filled us at once. People were already knocking on the door — women come to give birth after waiting for the holy day to end — and the Swede hurried below to admit them while Linka changed out of her white dress and went down to mop the floor and be of help. I went over the next morning’s travel arrangements with Mani, who made some remark and added with a laugh, “But you will not go — I will have the Turkish army arrest you — I have come to like you too much.” His making a joke of it made me feel better, as if he had already come to terms with our departure. Are you listening?

— In the morning a wagon came to pick me up at Jaffa Gate. Linka was sitting in it. I saw that her belongings had dwindled drastically. She had left most of her clothes with the Swede to give away to charity. She was pale and her eyes glistened redly as though after a big cry. Mani, on the other hand, seemed quite content with himself. He sat calmly by the driver, a heavy winter overcoat on his knees. If I had had my wits about me, I would have know what to make of that coat instead of simply staring at it blankly.

— Because since Beirut I have kept going over the clues, real and imaginary, that he gave us, until there is nothing that does not now seem a clue: the way he looked at the wheels of the train in the station — his asking the stoker how fast it could go — the seat he chose for himself…

— Yes, Papa dear, that was the first surprise. Instead of saying good-bye at the station, he boarded the train and informed us that he meant to see us off at the ship. In my innocence I assumed that he planned to take a carriage back that same night, which was the reason for the overcoat. I was actually glad that he was coming along, because I too found it hard to part from him and from Jerusalem, which vanished all at once behind the first downhill bend. Are you listening to me, Papa?

— No. But your head was nodding a bit — I thought that perhaps you had dozed off. I know that this has been wearisome for you, but I am nearing the end now — in fact, that is what I began with. Are you listening?

— We pulled into the station in Jaffa, where a crowd was rushing noisily about, and set out immediately for the port. Once again he began scolding our haste to depart. “But you have seen nothing yet,” he said. “Do you think Jerusalem is Palestine?” We could spy our ship in the distance — I must say that this time my little consumptive from the gare had outdone herself and ordered us a big Austrian steamship. The three of us were rowed out to it in a lighter manned by singing Arabs who flung us on deck with heave-hos. We were received there graciously and shown to two most pleasant cabins, from which we proceeded to the dining room for a late lunch, elegantly served us by a galley crew that plied us with great quantities of wine. Linka was wan and silent — rather withdrawn — and Mani and I had to joke with each other by ourselves. “What will you do on the waves without me?” he asked. “Who will see to your tranquillity pills?” The overcoat lay on a chair beside us like a big, hairy, faithful pet. We went on deck to have a smoke and a look at the white houses of Jaffa with their great minaret. The waves lapped at the ship. More lighters kept coming all the time, and the boatmen sang and heave-hoed their frightened passengers onto the deck while Mani looked on with an ironic, slightly mocking expression that I had never noticed in him before — that made me think of a first Mani slowly bursting open and discharging a second one from its midst. We sat for a long while, enjoying the cool, moist breeze and letting the afternoon hours slip languidly by while the last of the passengers arrived. We discussed the recent days — the clinic — the big Swede — young Mani. All of a sudden I took some coins from my pocket and asked him to buy his children gifts from us, especially the boy. He listened with a preoccupied air as I told him about our excursions together — about how his son worshiped him and craved his presence — about how fortunate it was that he would now have some time for him. At last he said: “He at least will know what he is craving for; I crave a father I never had and of whose existence I know so little that each time I seek to catch a glimpse of him in my son, I see not the young man who was killed in a brawl before my birth in the walled city, but the wily old face of my grandfather, standing before me in his black rabbinical clothes.” Linka sat there half-listening, as if she knew our talk was but a masquerade; she kept gazing out to sea, where the sun was now being punished with a fiery death. She was still very pale; she never touched the glass in front of her. She was waiting — without a word — for the farewells. Are you listening? Are you?

— But there were no farewells, that much you know. When the last call rang for the last lighter taking visitors back to shore, his movements grew suddenly lethargic; he cocked his head as if he had not heard, spread his coat out on the seat beside him, and said, “You have chosen a fine ship, but the waves are the same waves; I had better sail as far as Haifa with you to see how Efrayim makes out with them. This overcoat of mine will keep me warm on deck at night, but have no fear — I won’t be going all the way to Europe with you.” I saw Linka’s eyes open wide with horror; Mani beckoned to one of the deckhands, gave him the coins I had handed him, and looked down just in time to see the last lighter slip away from the ship and head back for the shore, which now began to wobble slightly. The houses of Jaffa shook a bit as if struck by a mild earthquake, and the green orange groves on the hills staggered backward. You see, Father, that ship was so quiet — its motion was so imperceptible — that we appeared to be standing still while an invisible hand tugged Palestine to the south, so that the land — now cloaked in darkness — floated slowly away as we observed its extraordinary motion. “Well, then,” said Mani, regarding me with a melancholy smile, “how is your stomach?” More to himself than to me, though, he whispered without waiting for an answer: “But what should be wrong with it? The fear, after all, has left you.” Are you listening, Father? Are you?

— You are fading out, Father. I can’t see your face. No, don’t fall asleep on me; don’t leave me all alone. Wait… wait… We sat silently on deck, wrapped in our blankets, watching the black land drift slowly by. The moon set. The stars flared up. Linka fell into a deep sleep and began slipping out of her chair, so that we had to take her down to her cabin. Mani helped me. Suddenly, feeling his hand against mine, I knew we were engaged in a wordless struggle for her…

— For Linka.

— Linka… are you listening?

— Give me some sign that you are… don’t keep so vindictively silent. There is — there was — no sign of dawn yet; the only illumination came from the lighthouse in Haifa, whose beacon revolved on a treeless hill in the dark shadow of a Carmelite monastery. The ship cast anchor at a distance from the city, whose little white houses, all neatly arranged in rows, were still swaddled in morning mist. The two of us stood on deck. Mani made me promise not to wake up Linka, and I thought: at long last we are saying good-bye! We waited for a launch that brought out some German Templars, each of whom the captain welcomed aboard in Austrian. Mani stood near him in his large overcoat, which made his dark silhouette look bigger and stronger, as if there were a second Mani inside it, embracing the first. The last of the Templars came aboard, and the deckhands waited for Mani to lower himself into the launch before raising anchor. All at once, though, he said to me: “You know, I have an urge to see Beirut. Of course, I haven’t been there for twenty-five years, but you still won’t find a better guide to it than me.” And that was when I felt my heart sink, Papa, because I realized that we were fated to have him follow us all the way to Europe — to Cracow — to Hasula — to Jelleny-Szad — to this corner — to the sofa by the fire — right into our beds. Are you listening? Give me some sign!

— In Beirut — it was noon now — all the passengers were invited to go ashore and enjoy the city until evening, when we would sail for Stamboul. Mani — his overcoat draped over one arm; the stubble of a beard on his cheeks; his hair looking grayer than ever — seemed — for the first time — to grow confused; his movements had become almost unrecognizably slow, as if he now were running on another — an infinite — time. We literally had to pull him ashore, where we stood by the wharves amid a crowd of passengers, many of them from other ships, looking for a cab. The hansoms kept trotting splendidly by, one after another, festooned with bright frills and bells; Mani, however, let all of them pass until at last he hailed one that was drawn by a coal-black horse. “Why, here is our lost steed,” he said with a smile, putting Linka and me in the back seat, which was spread with a colorful Persian rug, and seating himself up front by the coachman, his broad back facing us like a threat, although one that was aimed at himself. For the first time since leaving Katowice and taking the night train to Prague, I felt Linka clinging to me for protection. She had turned back into a girl — the jackknife, Father, that had sprung all its blades was now neatly folded again. Are you listening?

— We began driving through the city, which Mani was less interested in showing to us than in sating his memories with. It was for him a nostalgic reunion with places he had not seen for a quarter of a century; he discussed them intensely with the driver, who stopped from time to time to point something out to him or to dismount and pilot him into some little street or entranceway, leaving the two of us forlornly sitting in the hansom, parked in the middle of some marketplace or courtyard and surrounded by a lively motley of Arabs. We could not have known that our Mani had finished writing his drama — had added the stage directions — had cast the lead — had even picked his audience — and was now only looking for a place to set up his theater and put on the play. You are not listening to me! Will you listen?!

— Because when the carriage wheels raided at last over the rails of the railway line, he stopped the driver and got out wonderingly. You see, there had been no trains in Beirut when he had left it. At once he ordered the coachman to take us to the train station, as if it were there that the dispute between us would be settled. It was late afternoon now, and the first frail wisps of dusk streaked the sweet, strong Mediterranean light. When we reached the station, we saw that it was not far from the sea, in which our Austrian steamship was lolling regally. An unfamiliar flag was being run up on it. We entered the station house, which was as small as the one in Jerusalem but dirtier; in the space in front of the tracks some white-gowned Mohammedan pilgrims were hurrying to board a narrow-gauge train that was only a few cars long and still had no locomotive. There was no urgency, however; on the contrary, there was a sense of calm, which was heightened by the slow pacing of two Turkish sentries along the tracks. They had deep scabbards strapped to their sides and were lazily chewing on their mustaches while looking scornfully at the passengers. I could feel all eyes rest on us as soon as we stepped inside. A railway official came over to see what we wanted and Mani saluted him. “ Yahud,” I heard whispers around us, “yahud.” Yes, we were yahud, Mani assured the crowd at once. You could see that the place appealed to him, and when he heard that the train outside was bound for Damascus, he ran his glance over the soft clay hills as though someone important or beloved were waiting for him there and began to walk along the tracks in the wake of the Turkish soldiers. Only now, though, do I understand that — in the yellow squall of time closing in on us — the one passion left him was to set up the theater he had been traveling with for so long and to augment the audience brought by him from Palestine with the Turkish soldiers — the returning pilgrims — even the railway official, who had begun following him, determined to ferret out the true motives — were they really intending to take the train? — of the European tourists. But Mani was not about to tip his hand. “Well, well,” he said, coming back up the rails with a look of perfect composure, “so there is a railway line here now too. Who knows, perhaps in a few years you will be able to take a train straight from Jerusalem to that Oświ[ecedil]cim. of yours without having to brave the sea!” All of a sudden he stepped up to Linka and hugged her fiercely, then took her hand and kissed it front and back — you might have thought that the lust of that Polish pan from Basel had gotten into him. “Will you not leave her with me?” he asked me a last time, an odd, unrecognizable look on his face. I laughed nervously and said, “She is not mine.” “So you say,” he accused me bitterly, “and yet you are taking her from me. Let us say good-bye, then. The coachman will take you to your ship and I will take the train to Damascus. I never have been there. It is said to be a beautiful city.” And with that he asked us for money. He — who had never even spoken to us about money before: It was not clear how much he wanted, or if he was referring to a loan or a gift, and I began to hem and haw… are you listening?

— I began to hem and haw. I promised to send him a contribution for his clinic as soon as we got home — I promised to take the matter up with you too, Father — but he would not take that for an answer. With a hopeless look he insisted that he needed some cash at once, for his trip to Damascus. He knew we had lots of money. Linka, who could only guess what all this was about, because we had spoken nothing but Hebrew since the morning, squeezed my arm hard, and out of my pockets I began to produce Turkish bishliks — Austrian thalers — spare change from Italy — all of which he took before heading with it to the ticket office. He was gloomy when he rejoined us. “We shall never meet again,” he proclaimed, “and you are to blame. Do you not see that you are to blame?” I was still shaking my head when it flashed through my mind that I had made a terrible mistake — that the curtain had already risen — that before me no longer stood a doctor from Jerusalem but an actor forced to recite a script that he could not revise — one drummed into him immemorial ages ago — which — although he was the director and the theater owner too — he was not at liberty to leave unperformed and must stage to the bitter end. His expression had changed. He was staring at us with a thunderstruck, faraway look, through the telescope of his own contempt… and then he turned, slung the overcoat over his shoulders, and began to walk down the platform, alongside the crowded cars of Mohammedan pilgrims whose cigarette smoke spiraled out the windows like a first intimation of the locomotive that now could be heard whistling in the distance. Linka was overcome with horror. “Stop him!” she screamed in Yiddish. “Let’s take him with us!” “But how?” I asked. “He is going to Damascus and we must return to the ship.” She would not listen to me, though. She began to pull me after her, as if she wished us to board the train for Damascus too, just as we were. Mani had reached the last car by now. He let his overcoat drop to the platform — the thought struck me that he did not want to bloody it — and then — with a gentle movement — lowered himself onto the tracks. A Turkish soldier started to shout at him. But Mani just turned away his face, which — in the reddish light that drifted in from the sea — looked hard and vanquished, and resumed walking along the tracks, wagging a reproving finger at the black locomotive that appeared around the bend as if it were a child home late from school. The locomotive tore him apart instantly, like a sword stroke. Father, aren’t you listening?

— What?

— Yes. I hung on with all my might to Linka, who began running toward him along with the Mohammedans jumping out of the cars — the news had reached every one of them in no time. As if I didn’t know the common people’s lust to stare at the dead and the maimed! The two Turkish soldiers began pushing the crowd back — striking out at it — striking at Linka — letting no one through but me — who was running with his overcoat, screaming and begging to cover the two halves of him before she could get to them… Papa dear — Papa — ah, look! — it is dawn already… I have been talking nonstop… Papa?

— You fell asleep, old man. Look at me… Papa, Papa, answer me… don’t scare me… what is the matter?

— What is the matter? What did I say? Why are you crying?

— But I don’t understand. Dearest Papa! You are crying. Why?

— But for whom?

— For him? Him? How can you? You… what are… oh, Papa…

— To blame? How? I told you we were just a pretext…

— How stayed with him? What are you talking about?

— By myself?

— Summoned you? From where? To where? You do not know what you are talking about…

— The master of what?

— But it was his own self. The demon inside him. You will drive me out of my senses… stayed with him? I like that, ha ha…

— What kind of cynicism?

— Nihilism? No, I have said quite enough… But what are you crying for? For whom? Can’t you see that Mama is very ill? You are blind… she is going to die… if you must cry, cry for those you should cry for…

Biographical

Supplement

Although EFRAYIM SHAPIRO left his parents’ estate as he promised to, it took him a year because of the sudden deterioration in the health of his mother, who died a month after her children’s return from Palestine. It was not until the late autumn of 1900 that Efrayim moved to Cracow, where he took a job as a pediatric physician in a hospital. Linka, who could not bear the loneliness of life on the estate, followed him there and found work as a volunteer nurse in the same hospital. Before long she fell in love with a Catholic doctor and — after a bitter quarrel with her father and brother, who were opposed to the match — became his wife. She converted to Catholicism, moved with her husband to Warsaw, and had a son and a daughter there.

The dramatic estrangement was exceedingly painful, and soon the family was reconciled. Indeed, since Efrayim Shapiro remained a bachelor, he grew greatly attached to his niece and nephew, whom he visited often in Warsaw and saw during summer vacations on his father’s estate, to which Linka usually came without her husband.

After the death of Sholom Shapiro in 1918, Linka sold her share of the estate to local farmers, while Efrayim returned to Jelleny-Szad and settled on his half of the land, which was run by a steward. Although his income from it was not as great as his father’s had been, it was still a respectable amount, enough for him to cut down on his medical practice and limit it to occasional house calls in Oświ[ecedil]cim. In effect, he led a leisurely life of early retirement, the happiest moments of which were the visits of his beloved sister and her children — who, despite their having been baptized, took a lively interest in their mother and uncle’s Jewishness.

With the outbreak of World War II and the German blitzkrieg that overran Poland, Efrayim Shapiro, who was sixty-nine at the time, went to Warsaw to be with his sister. It did not take him long to realize, however, that her home was not a safe hiding place for him and that she, her children, and her grandchildren were in no less danger than he was. Soon he returned to his estate, where — with the help of some loyal servants — he constructed the perfect hideaway and “disappeared.” He remained there from 1939 to 1943, within sight of the nearby concentration camp, whose increasingly technologically advanced features the old doctor had more than an inkling of. When news reached him after the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto that his niece had been sent to Auschwitz, he became so distraught that he gave himself up to the Germans for no good reason, thereby spelling the doom of his servants as well. He never reached the camp itself, however. Collapsing at the entrance to it, he was shot and killed on the spot at the age of seventy-three.

SHOLOM SHAPIRO did not have an easy time of it after his wife’s death. Having learned to live with the fact of her poor health, he had never dreamed that she would die so quickly. After his son and daughter left Jelleny-Szad, he tried to cope with his loneliness by intensifying his Zionist activity. He did not attend the Fourth Zionist Congress in London because it was held during the year of mourning for his wife, but he was present at the Fifth Congress, which took place in Basel again, and in 1909 he visited Palestine with a group organized by him from the Zionist Club in Cracow. It was a highly successful tour that strengthened the Zionist convictions of its members. While in Jerusalem, Sholom Shapiro went off one day to look for the Manis, but he did not find any of them. Although he was able to locate the clinic in Kerem Avraham, by then converted into a cheap tourists’ hostel, and to identify it by the faded remains of some mirrors in one of its ground-floor rooms, none of the Mani family lived there anymore. Young Yosef Mani, he was told, had departed two years previously to study in Turkey, had stopped on his way in Beirut, and had vanished there. His sister had married a Moroccan Jew and gone with her mother to live with him in Marseilles. The neighbors who told Shapiro all this remembered well the brother and sister from Poland who had been in Jerusalem in 1899 with catastrophic results for their beloved doctor.

Despite his disappointment at being unable to locate the Manis and offer them financial compensation, Sholom Shapiro was highly satisfied with his trip to Palestine. Although no longer a young man, he formed in the course of it a romantic attachment to a young lady from Cracow, a member of the tour group, which continued after his return to Jelleny-Szad.

Like Efrayim, Sholom was greatly attached to his “Christian” grandchildren. Since his daughter’s home in Warsaw was not kosher, he did not often visit them there, but each year he waited impatiently for their summer excursion to the countryside, during which he taught them some Hebrew and Judaism. He died after a brief illness in 1918, at the age of seventy, having lived long enough to rejoice at the news of the Balfour Declaration.