by Mark Helprin
“How can that be?”
“They left all that behind,” the guard said. “They have big thick doormats, and gold utensils. They have indoor plumbing, electrical lights, and fountain pens. They have English clothing, German typewriters, and the most beautiful leatherwork you have ever seen, not to mention furniture, automobiles, and glass windows. Everyone has servants. The servants have servants. The servants of servants have servants, and they have servants, too. There is no one who hasn’t got machines. I have machines. He has machines,” he said, pointing to the other guard. “And everyone, of course, has a telephone, which is what makes Koidanyev rich in the first place.”
“A what?”
“A telephone.”
Though Jacob Bayer knew half a dozen languages, he did not know Greek. He knew enough etymology, however, to parse the roots of the word. “Everyone has someone who can speak at long distances?”
“Not a person, a machine.”
“Ah,” said Jacob Bayer, “a talking machine. Good idea. I know only the telegraph. As a youth, I was much more interested in such things than I am now. Then that which was supposed to have been startling and new seemed to be only a variation of what had come before, and I realized that I had begun to pretend to myself to be amazed when I wasn’t amazed at all. So now I do without them, as I do without most everything.”
“They won’t believe that, and once you saw Koidanyev you would want to be rich like them.”
“I don’t think so,” said Jacob Bayer, remembering his consistent inability to do what other people did. “All my life I have done nothing but study. Had I wanted to be rich I would have sold dictionaries. Had I wanted to be powerful I would have been a rabbi. But I have no position and no power. I’m a nothing. Very early on, I was entranced by the notion of truth, and the more I concentrated on it the less opportunity I had to become a something. But although riches last for a generation or two, honor lasts forever. After you depart, your riches are divided, but your honor is indivisible.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said the first guard, “we’ll let you in if you wait until evening so you won’t be seen coming from the road. At dusk everyone is so busy that no one will notice. But you have to promise that when you leave, if ever you do, you’ll give us half of whatever you take with you. You see, they don’t pay us, we have a deal instead.”
“Every material thing,” the second guard said, “that you haven’t taken in with you, or that you have replaced at a higher value. In Koidanyev a teacher of the new things can have a whole chicken three times a day if he wants, buttered rolls with jam every morning, gribenes, chopped liver, p’tcha, oranges, boiled beef. That’s what kind of place it is. Do you accept?”
Having little and expecting nothing, Jacob Bayer accepted. They took inventory: a leather bag, a willow bundle for the brushing of teeth, fine soap, a steel pen, two pencils, a bottle of ink, a Tanach, a dictionary, prayer equipment, a locket with pictures of his mother and father, his folding spectacles in a leather case, and a knife for cutting salami on those lucky days when he could get near one. Surveying this, they were sure that he would become just like them and everyone else in Koidanyev. How could he not? No one who came into this better world had yet chosen to love the old one more.
AS HE WALKED through the abundance of Koidanyev in early evening, Jacob Bayer was seized with inexplicable melancholy. What objection could he have to prosperity that had arisen out of genius and hard work? Why did the unprecedented vitality here—perhaps the only place he had ever seen in all the Baltic and White Russia where the song of things had left the minor key—not lift him as it did others? A man of honor, he stood ready to condemn himself for envy. But he felt no envy, and, to the contrary, was grateful that the euphoria had failed to touch him and that he was neither as happy nor as confident as the people he saw. They, who had so much, seemed lost, and he, who had nothing, knew exactly where he stood. Was it possible that their happiness might be less even than his unhappiness?
On the road, he had now and then eaten apples, pears, and cherries, and he remembered each as exactly the rarity it was. In stalls on the streets of Koidanyev and in well ordered stores lit with electric lamps were every type of fruit he had ever known or imagined, and fruit of which he had never heard: all those of a temperate climate, of course; citrus of every variety, half of which he never knew existed; dates; currants; mangoes; papayas; bananas; kiwis; star fruit; breadfruit; passion fruit; and a hundred obscurities such as, for example, Chilean cat pears, which were the color of mourning doves and tasted like marzipan. They came fresh, dried, canned, jarred, candied, compoted, diced, doused, soused, and sugared. It was not enough to be a date. A date had to be a medjool date. And even that was not enough. There were “huge,” “giant,” “premium,” and “extrastupendous” medjool dates. To further assuage the need for money to change hands, some of these competing dates came in magnificent containers of crystal, Bristol, sterling, and gold, and if that were not enough they accomplished their final conquest simply by being expensive beyond any reason or justification, which made them, somehow, and to some, infinitely desirable. And that was just fruit.
Of bagels the people of Koidanyev were so knowledgeable and libertine that they made them with things that had no connection to bagels, such as pineapple, tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese, and saffron. Of saffron they had so much that they sold it by the kilo, as they did truffles, caviar, and shrimp. “Shrimp? What is that?” Jacob Bayer asked a fishmonger in a silk suit with a perfectly snowy white shirt and gold buttons.
The fishmonger looked over his Scottish smoked salmon, his bluefish, his tuna, and his herring in Calvados. “Shrimp,” he said. “If you wait until tomorrow we’ll have the ones that are the size of chickens. They make a meal in themselves served on a bed of wilted arugula with a good Champagne.”
“Aren’t they forbidden?” Jacob Bayer asked. He knew they were.
“When the telephone came to Koidanyev,” the vendor said, “we rethought all those things.”
As Jacob Bayer made his way through the hive of commercial streets he noticed that the people walked as purposefully as soldiers. They laughed deeply and spoke fast. And they were healthy. Perhaps, like him, they had been in the early summer sun, and it was this that made them glow. More foreign to his experience than anything else was that they talked into black instruments from which they appeared to receive no answer, and carried on conversations that were half alive.
The talking was unearthly—faster, more uniform of tone, more insistent, with few rests or pauses, and a strange migration of the eyes as the head remained fixed in an effort to please the invisible. Even praying was not like this, but much more fluid and natural. This had the air of bad acting, and everyone did it. It was stentorian, clipped, and vain, and yet there was no stage.
Street vendors spoke on telephones. Storekeepers did. People sat alone in parlors, smiling, and talking. In restaurants, telephones sat on every table and people talked on every telephone. In the main squares were rows of glass-and-mahogany sentry booths with weathered copper roofs. Hundreds of people were inside them, talking, but no one was talking to anyone around him, except two men who were having a business argument through double layers of glass. Women flirted—you could see it on their faces. Men tried to be forceful and impressive, but their focus was not—as Jacob Bayer had seen all his life and had assumed would be forever—upon another person, but, rather, into a machine, with a glazed expression and a clenched arm.
EVEN AT MIDNIGHT or three o’clock in the morning, Koidanyev crackled with business, which Jacob Bayer discovered as he walked in search of a heder. In most towns these were thicker than mink hair. Everything else being dust and wind, the chief purpose of life in those places was to follow truth to glory, and this you did not do with silver plate or toys or telephones.
Though the population of Koidanyev had swelled, most of the hadarim had been shut as tight as in the days of the Mongols. What terror had closed these schools?
What terror could there possibly have been in peace and abundance? When Jacob Bayer banged on doors as if notices of abandonment were not pasted across them, no one answered, but eventually he came to a heder that was still open. It was on the kind of street that he knew well, where once many hadarim had existed in magnificent confusion, with contests every day to see, for example, which group of six-year-olds was best at biblical exegesis. These children, who, as they shifted positions around a single text, famously learned to read upside down and sideways, were as wild as young goats and as serious as old men. Jacob Bayer imagined that the hadarim of Koidanyev would be much like those of other villages. The best scholars would be here, and the riches of the town would surround its students and rabbis like a golden keep, freeing them for their studies and devotions. But it wasn’t so.
The buildings that had not long before housed the kind of place where he would teach had become schools of the telephone: a telephone answering school, an installation academy, a design and manufacturing school, and a few other arcane subdivisions—the Telephone Materials Modeling Institute, the Center for Telephone Studies, the Byelorussian Telephone Enterprise Institute, et cetera. But among the well tended facades of these institutions was an ancient and decaying building that apparently was still a religious school, so he knocked at the door.
From within appeared an actual rabbi of the normal variety whose inexpensive clothing did not lustrously echo the moon and whose expression was devoid of euphoria. He looked at Jacob Bayer and knew at once what had happened. “They let you in,” he said, “in exchange for half.” He waved his hands. “But we can give you only one chicken a day. We’re not like the telephone and typewriter schools that serve veal and cakes even to the students. Twenty kopecks is as high as I’ll go.”
“Per month?” asked Jacob Bayer.
The rabbi, Ezekiel Blarma, looked at him, understanding that he had not been in Koidanyev long. “Per hour.”
“I couldn’t eat a chicken a day,” Jacob Bayer said, when he had recovered.
“A big man, like you? A giant?”
“It would make me feel like a stuffed chair.”
“How about a chicken every other day?”
“Every three days.”
Rabbi Blarma threw back his head. “Okay, but, before we go further, who was your teacher?”
“Rabbi Toskies, the Gaon of Shpaigle.”
“The Tzaddik of Vilna?”
“The very one.”
“But that was when he was young. When he was old. …”
“When he was old he lived on a lake near Pleshchenitsy, and he had two students: Meir of Rovino and Jacob Bayer of Rosenheim. I am Jacob Bayer.”
“Rosenheim in Bavaria?”
“I was born there. Then my father had a vision that told him to leave Germany.”
“He came here?”
“Visions can be wrong.”
“Come in,” said the downtrodden rabbi. “You should sleep. There’s a room for you on the third floor.”
As Jacob Bayer climbed the stairs, he heard his host say, “A chicken a day, if you want. Defend us!”
WHEN JACOB BAYER awoke late in the morning he looked out his casement window at a quiet view of the city. From three stories up he could see roofs, chimneys, dormers, and the hills beyond the town. Here and there, the colors of slate and painted tin were touched with blurs of bright red, the signature of roses and geraniums in window boxes. Against white curtains drifting lazily on barely moving winds they looked civilized and reassuring. Perhaps his fatigue and dehydration had been the cause of the threatening undercurrent he had felt from the moment he entered Koidanyev. It was a prosperous town. Why should good fortune be threatening? Perhaps he had been too poor too long.
As he washed in his own bathroom, using hot running water for the first time in his life, he began to feel a certain excitement. The children of this heder might know things he did not. Surely, none of them would be hungry. How pleasant to finish a day’s work and then have a hot buttered roll and tea without giving it a second thought. Perhaps most exciting was that this town, he now realized, was like the towns in Bavaria that his father had told him about: rich, quiet, full of good air, with a river that was cold and pure. He went downstairs, expecting the main hall to be animated with the life-giving presence of those who move fast and whose eyes are enchantingly bright.
But the main hall was empty, and Rabbi Blarma sat alone at a table for fifty people.
“Where are the children?” Jacob Bayer asked.
The rabbi said nothing.
“Is it a holiday?”
Still nothing.
“It’s not a holiday,” Jacob Bayer said in answer to his own question. “Where is everybody? It’s late.”
Rabbi Blarma looked up. “There aren’t very many children in Koidanyev,” he said. “And those that there are go to the other schools. The parents are frightened.”
“Of what?”
“They want their children to learn about the telephone, so they won’t be left behind.”
“Where is the telephone going that it would leave them behind?”
“I don’t know,” said the rabbi, “but they act as if they do know, even if they probably don’t. They don’t like me, because I don’t have a telephone.”
“They must not like a lot of people,” Jacob Bayer said.
The rabbi shook his head. “I’m the only one in Koidanyev who doesn’t have a telephone. First, they can’t believe it. You don’t have a telephone? No! They laugh at me. You really don’t have a telephone? Then they get scared. Why don’t you have a telephone? How can you exist without a telephone? What is the matter with you? It really frightens them. Then they begin to hate me. It’s happened so often I could time eggs by it.”
“What’s wrong with having a telephone? What harm would it do?” Jacob Bayer asked.
“You, too? What’s wrong with not having a telephone?”
“Nothing. I don’t have a telephone. Who cares?”
“I used to ask that very question,” said Rabbi Blarma. “When you do, they tell you what’s wrong with not having a telephone, and then they tell you why you must have one. It lasts for as long as you sit there, and then they pick up and follow you down the street. They would talk about it until the end of time. They speak like the possessed.”
After some thought, Jacob Bayer said, “In his introduction to The Book of Evenings, Rabbi Baruch of Minsk says that suffering is an entangling vine that grows outward with a green embrace.”
Rabbi Blarma nodded knowingly. “Would you like a tomato?”
“Please.” As Rabbi Blarma got up, Jacob Bayer asked, “Why is it that the road to the town is empty, and yet the town is so full of goods? Where do they come from? Is there another road?”
“No.” Rabbi Blarma looked down as he walked to the table, sadly it seemed, but probably so as not to make the tomato roll off the plate.
“And what does the town give in trade for all these wonderful things? I saw no one in the fields. They lie fallow. The sound of iron striking iron is absent, or of saws working through wood. Even the mill wheels are chained.”
“The telephone,” said Rabbi Blarma.
“What do you mean, ‘The telephone’? How?”
“I don’t know. That’s what they say. Who am I to argue with shops full of Italian leather and British furniture?”
“But wait,” Jacob Bayer said, suddenly realizing something. “You hired me.”
“Yes.”
“For a chicken every three days, tea …” His voice trailed off.
The rabbi nodded.
Jacob Bayer looked at him quizzically. “There are no students.”
“There are no students,” the rabbi confirmed.
“Then what is my job?”
“To go before the commission. I was going to do it, but I’m too old.”
“You didn’t say anything about a commission.”
“I didn’t, no.”
“What
commission?”
HASKELL SAMOA, the chief rabbi of Koidanyev, claimed that he had been a disciple of Rabbi Smilksteen of Pokoik. When, in ’03, he arrived in Koidanyev, unlike most rabbis he had no valises full of decrepit books. He traveled light and wore the clothes of a rich man. When asked where his books were, he laughed. “I have none,” he said, “but I have this.” He removed from his only piece of luggage, so that all who were gathered could see, two dry cells, two brass and rosewood telephone sets, and an immense spool of gold-plated copper wire.
He made great show of unraveling the wire and running it along branches and walls from one end of Koidanyev to the other. Then he hooked up his sets and batteries, and had the puzzled assistant rabbi man one of them. He called for the fastest boy in town, a yeshiva bokher who was as tall as a giraffe and as skinny as a willow, and had once taken a message from Koidanyev to Slutsk—nineteen versts—in fifty minutes. In his special silk shoes, this boy could run the two versts from one end of Koidanyev to the other in less than six minutes. Only a horse could go faster, but that was too dangerous in a crowded town.
Haskell Samoa wrote out a message on a piece of paper. It read, “What hath G–d wrought?” Then he asked for the crowd to supply random numbers, which he added to the message: 12127212232. When the clock struck eleven, he gave the message to the runner, who vanished like a satin-winged bat. Six minutes later, when the bat arrived at the other end of the line, the assistant rabbi said triumphantly, “Before the clock had finished striking eleven, we had the message, What hath G–d wrought: twelve billion, one hundred and twenty-seven million, two hundred and twelve thousand, two hundred and thirty-two. How do you like that!”
As soon as the impact of this had been assimilated (some found it hard to comprehend), and after many people had had the opportunity to converse with others two versts away, Haskell Samoa was called a tzaddik, gaon, and miracle worker. Then he established the commission. The power and gravity of Koidanyev’s institutions migrated to it with great rapidity, leaving them to wither and die. As fast as customs could originate from within the commission, they replaced old customs that no longer seemed necessary.