Shira

by Agnon, S. Y.

  They sat together and exchanged pleasantries. Manfred was afraid he might say something inappropriate, for in such a setting and at such a time one might very well say words it would be embarrassing to recall, because of their banality. Manfred took the flowers from Henrietta and put her hand in his rather gruffly. He placed the flowers on a rock and closed his eyes. He saw Henrietta’s affection rising up before him, completely engulfing him. Now her hand was in his, lifeless. Only the afterscent of the flowers he took from her hand and placed on the rock was still alive. Manfred knew that the stress of caring for the household and the children had consumed the years of love. Add to this the anxiety about her relatives in Germany, where God’s wrath was loose. To remain alive, her relatives and acquaintances needed certificates. Henrietta used to spend half her day dealing with the household and the other half in pursuit of certificates. The household had its routines. As for the immigration officials, if no tears can move their ruthless hearts, from whence will our help come? While Manfred held Henrietta’s hand, the day darkened, the garden grew dusky, the array of colors vanished from the sky, and an evening chill set in. Henrietta went to get her shawl. Manfred followed her. As she wrapped herself in the shawl, Manfred reached out his arms and embraced her. She teased him and said, “What do you want with this withered stick of wood?” And she slipped out of his arms.

  Chapter eighteen

  Zahara and Tamara, Manfred and Henrietta’s daughters, came to welcome their little sister. Zahara is about nineteen, and Tamara is a year and a half younger as well as half a head taller, for she was only a baby when her parents brought her to this country, whose special milk makes people tall. Their faces are tanned, their hands steady – Zahara’s as a result of work, and Tamara’s from bathing in the sea and rowing on the Yarkon. Zahara belongs to a kvutza called Kfar Ahinoam, and Tamara is a student at a teachers’ seminary in Tel Aviv. They were both slow to arrive. One, because of a group of youngsters from abroad she was asked to take charge of; the other, because she went hiking with some friends.

  Before dealing with the daughters, let us deal with the parents. Henrietta is blonde; her limbs are full and relaxed, responding to her at work as well as at rest. Her eyes are a medium blue that can turn fierce. Her hair is pulled across the middle of her ears and folded up in back, framing her face and leaving her neck exposed. Manfred is dark. His hair is thick, so that, seeing him in the street, you assume he is on the way to get a haircut. His eyes, either laughing or bemused, suggest a pleasant temperament. His mouth is small. A narrow mustache separates his nose from his mouth, and a wrinkle begins between his eyes, curving up to his broad forehead, where it joins with the other three and a half wrinkles that are there. This is approximately how Manfred and Henrietta look.

  Now I will give about a pen’s worth of ink to a description of their daughters. But I will precede this with a few remarks about our other sisters in this land, as well as about ourselves.

  When we came to the Land of Israel, we were shy young men with no interest in women, our every thought being centered on the land and on work. Finding work, we found a slice of bread, a plate of greens, and a cup of tea, and we were grateful for the land and its bounty. If we didn’t find work, we were hungry. In a hungry period, we sometimes danced to take our minds off our hunger. Whether or not the Lord of Hunger saw our situation, we paid no attention to Him. Either way, we were devoured by malaria and the other scourges of the land. If a young woman fell in with our group, we paid no attention to her looks, since it was not for the sake of beauty that she came to this country, but to work the land. When we sat discussing land, labor, farmers, and workers, it didn’t occur to us that the One who made farmers different from laborers made young men and women different too. If a fellow had his eye on a girl, it was her virtues that interested him, not her anatomy; if he had romantic tendencies, he would be interested in her doleful eyes, her plaintive voice. If she brought us songs of her homeland, in Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Ruthenian – which is now called Ukrainian – and sang them to us, we enjoyed these times on the beach at Jaffa far more than any concert we later attended in Europe’s great cities.

  There were other young women, whose families were Sephardic exiles descended from the ruling class of Judea, from the tribe of Judah, like David our king and like our righteous Messiah, who will come to deliver us from exile in the lands of Edom and Ishmael. They would sit at a window and never come out of the house, for their dignity enclosed them. Unlike their Ashkenazic sisters, their dignity was interior. Their eyes were black; their black hair was parted in the middle and flowed to the edge of the forehead. A blue-black or black-blue spark flashed from their eyes, settling on their eyebrows with a fiery glow. A baffled smile fluttered over their mouth. Between eyes and mouth, the nose loomed, angry and menacing.

  There were others, also descendants of exiles from Spain. They took on any job that came their way to earn their bread. Both their hair and their eyes were black. Their eyebrows glistened with warm compassion. Their mouth seemed about to cry, and, when they opened their lips to sing, their voice would embrace you and you would want to cry for no reason. If you took notice of such a one, she would turn away from the window and withdraw into the house. Why? Because you could have asked her father for her hand, but you did no such thing; you merely peered and gazed at her.

  There were other young women, Moroccans, with full faces, oval heads, eyes almost as large as their face. I mean not to disparage but to praise these eyes, for they animated the entire face. They spoke a brand of Arabic not many people in this country would recognize. We include ourselves, realizing that, if we were to speak Arabic, the Arabs would assume it was Russian.

  There were still others, descendants of the exile into Yemen, the cruelest of all exiles. They came to this country with a purpose – to welcome the Messiah, for our righteous Messiah will reveal himself here first, before other countries. They left homes filled with every comfort and came empty-handed, with only the clothes on their back, carrying their books, which were written with ink on parchment and on parchmentlike paper. Some were copied from the manuscripts of our great Maimonides; others, we had heard of but never seen until these immigrants from Yemen came to the country. They wandered from desert to desert, hungry and thirsty. Their days were consumed by drought, their nights by frost, and they couldn’t sleep for fear of snakes, scorpions, or bandits. Still, they never said, “Why did we forsake a settled place to wander in this wasteland?” When they reached this country, they were not welcomed with bread; no door was opened to shelter them from the night, for their brothers regarded them as strangers. They slept in the woods, foraged for food, accepted their fate without rebelling. God opened the eyes of a few unique individuals, who saw the plight of their brothers from Yemen, bought Kfar Hashiloah, and built them houses there, so they could live off the yield of their labor. This, in summary, is the tale of our brothers, the early settlers from Yemen who have been a boon to the country.

  So much for the fathers, for I mean to deal only with the daughters.

  They were like children, though already mothers. Only yesterday they were nurslings; today it is they who offer the breast. We noticed their work but not their charm. The good Lord, cherishing their reserve, spread a film over our eyes, so we would not be led astray.

  There were others, from the land of Queen Esther. Their eyes were as sweet as the raisins from which wine is made for Pesah, and their hair soft as the neck of a songbird. They wore so many layers that their limbs didn’t show. Their ragged clothes concealed their beauty, like the wretched exile they had come from.

  We will also mention those distant sisters we saw in Jerusalem when we made a pilgrimage there. On special occasions and holidays, we used to stroll through the Bukharan Quarter. It was the largest and most sweeping of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods. All its houses were grand and elegant. Grandest of all was the splendid house built for the Messiah, our king, who, when he comes, will come to Jerusalem first. Our
forefathers, elders, prophets, kings, generals, and scribes will come to receive him, along with many righteous men and dignitaries. To house them all, our brothers from Bukhara have prepared grand and elegant quarters.

  So much for the houses; I will now deal only with the daughters.

  Their faces were full. Their colorfully embroidered garments adorned the streets. They were round, absolutely round, the embodiment of good fortune. We walked the streets of the neighborhood, our eyes on the locked doors, the closed houses – the lovely girls will appear now, they’ll come out for us to see. When they came out, it didn’t occur to us that young men such as we were could approach them. The reserve was so intense in that generation that a young man – even one who devoured romantic novels and perhaps composed his own – would never presume to approach a girl not destined by God to be his wife.

  There were other young women from the cities of Lebanon, from Damascus, Aleppo, Izmir, Babylonia, all the cities of Ishmael – each with unique charm and beauty. The Creator made pots of goodness and offered them to us, but their loads are so heavy that, before we get a good look at them, their beauty fades. This is how it was when we were young.

  Between yesterday and today, our generation has changed its aspect. Its young women have done likewise. The world was stripped of its original beauty; primeval beauty was eclipsed, and other concepts of beauty began to dominate our minds, then our hearts. Neither lovely eyes nor a warm face make a woman attractive now. Shapely limbs, a proud bearing, and light-footedness are the qualities that count. A body like an aspen, quaking with every breeze, is considered beautiful.

  Now, to get back to the two Herbst daughters. I will begin with Tamara. True, Zahara is the older one, but when they appear together, one sees Tamara first.

  Tamara, as I have noted, is tall, and her cheeks are full – you might say plump. Her forehead is narrow. Her eyes are small, suggesting two bronze specks in which the artist has engraved the trace of a smile. Her hair, like her eyes, has a bronze cast to it, and she wears it loose and disheveled. As I already suggested, her eyes have a mysterious smile, but her mouth laughs openly, and it’s hard to find anything that doesn’t elicit laughter from this mouth. I have listed all her obvious qualities. As for the less obvious ones, who can say? So much for Tamara. Now I will turn to Zahara.

  Zahara is blonde, like her mother. But she is shorter than her mother, father, or sister, as she was born in Germany during the lean years, when a pregnant or nursing woman had to struggle to find food to sustain her child. Henrietta used to tell that, when she was pregnant with Zahara, a bottle of oil fell into her hands, and she exulted over it all day. Because of this meager prenatal fare, Zahara arrived in the world serious. Tell her a joke, and you won’t get even the ghost of a smile; even when she herself tells an amusing story, such as the tale of the controversy between kvutza members and Jewish National Fund officials who called the kvutza Tel Vernishevsky, after one of thousands of active Zionists whose names are forgotten once they are dead. The kvutza members, however, called it Kfar Ahinoam, after Ahinoam the Holstein, a comely dairy cow, arguing that whereas man eats, drinks, and produces waste, she eats the waste and produces milk, butter, cream, and cheese. Zahara doesn’t so much as smile, even when she describes her friend Avraham-and-a-half, who is taller than anyone, as tall as two people, but is called Avraham-and-a-half because of his modesty. Once, when they were on a walk together, Zahara sprained her ankle, and Avraham-and-a-half picked her up and carried her. Anyone who saw them from a distance would have been astonished at such a tall woman. Zahara tells this story, too: There was a Yemenite in another kvutza, near Ahinoam, who was installed there by the religious party to slaughter poultry in the ritual manner and perform marriages throughout the area. He used to sit in his hut composing poems, which he sold to collectors. He tucked his legs under him and leaned to the left or on his knees as he wrote, adding poems to the cycle he was composing. Being preoccupied with his poetry, he often appeared at a wedding after the event. But everyone was so eager to please him, they set up the canopy and had him perform the ceremony anyway.

  The father of these daughters sat in his study, with the mounds of printed matter this country provides in profusion laid out before him. He didn’t discard it, out of respect for the written word. He didn’t look it over, because he knew there was nothing of substance there. Being an orderly man, Herbst took the trouble to put these papers in order: announcements with announcements, reminders with reminders, letters with letters; another pile for memos, appeals, political flyers, and the like, put out by national and charitable institutions, scholarly and political groups, children’s schools and academies, jubilee committees and plain committees – the assorted material one receives daily. An entire lifetime is not long enough to look it over.

  Tamara came in and stood behind him. She leaned over him and said, “So, Manfred, you’ve made us a sister.” At that moment, the father was not comfortable with his daughter’s impudence, and he asked, “How are your classes?” Tamara answered, “Don’t worry, I’ll get my diploma.” Her father said, “When I was your age, my studies were more important to me than the diploma.” Tamara responded coyly, “When you were my age, you weren’t expected to know when Issachar Ber Schlesinger was born, and you weren’t expected to know that poem about the statue of Apollo wrapped in phylacteries.” Herbst regarded her harshly and said, “That’s absurd.” Tamara said, “You see, Father, we’re expected to learn those absurdities, and they determine whether we advance to the next class or fail. That’s how it is, Manfred.” Herbst placed both his hands on the piles of paper and muttered whatever he muttered. Tamara stared at his papers out of the corner of her tiny eyes and said, “Wow! Your desk is popping with wisdom!”

  Zahara came in and said, “Hello, Father. The little one is sweet. I’ve never seen such an adorable baby. She’s intelligent, too. When I said, ‘You’re my sister,’ she looked me over to see if I deserve to be her sister. You’ve acquired some new books, Father. The shelves are full, the desk is full, even the floor is full. I won’t be surprised if we have to start coming in through the chimney. What are you up to? Mother says you hardly leave the house. In that case, you’ll soon have a book in print.”

  Herbst took a chair and said, “Sit down, Zahara. Sit down. How are you, my child?” Zahara said, “That’s good advice, I’m really tired. It’s nice to sit in your room, Father. I can’t remember when I last sat on an upholstered chair.” Herbst took another chair, moved it, and said to Tamara, “You can have a seat, too. So, Tamara, no marvels to report from school?” Tamara said playfully, “You want marvels? Who expects marvels these days? In my opinion, even small accomplishments are excessive.” Herbst said, “I met up with your history teacher, and he said to me – “ Tamara said, “Never mind what he said. What did you say? In your place, I would have said to him, ‘A deadhead like you ought to cover his tiresome face to keep me from yawning.’“ Herbst said, “Don’t you think a person should know our nation’s history?” Tamara said, “Then the nation should make the kind of history I want to know.” Her father said, “Your tongue is quick, my dear.” Tamara said, “I can’t tie my tongue to a birthing bed.” Zahara said, “It’s impossible to talk to you, Tamara.” Tamara answered, “And you’re such a conversationalist? Is it essential to talk? I like people I can sit with in silence. Who’s knocking on the door?”

  Zahara got up to open the door and returned with a heavy, loose-limbed young man carrying a briefcase, confident he was created for a purpose. He placed his hat on the desk, took a chair, sat down, perspired, opened the briefcase, took out a notebook, leafed through it, and said to Herbst, “You haven’t paid your dues; you owe one grush.” Herbst paid him, and the young man added, “You probably want to subscribe to the jubilee volume the committee is putting out for Getzkuvitz.” Herbst said, “I have never had the privilege of hearing that name.” The young man said, “Is it possible you never heard of Getzkuvitz? He’s the Getzkuvitz who…�
�� and he talked on and on, until Herbst put his hands on his head, wishing for a refuge.

  As soon as the visitor left, Zahara asked her father what would be done with the grush he came to collect and why he called it a grush when he meant a shilling. Her father said, “Who knows?” Zahara said, “And you gave it to him without asking what it’s for?” Herbst said, “In this country, is it possible to investigate every organization that asks for money? Mother contributes to forty funds whose names she doesn’t even know. If you wanted to know the names of all the funds that demand money, you would have to appoint a special secretary, and even that wouldn’t do. It’s easier to get rid of them with money. Words don’t work.” Zahara said, “The officials know that, and they set their agents on your trail. Nonetheless, one should ask them what they give you for your money.” Herbst laughed and said, “They don’t give me anything.” Tamara said to her sister, “You’re asking such questions – you, a kvutza member!” Zahara looked at her disdainfully and offered no response. Tamara realized she had overstepped and said to her sister, “Don’t be upset, honey. Let’s get back to Sarah. What do you think of her?” Zahara said, “She’s a sweetheart.” Tamara said, “I can picture you at her age. You were probably a sweetheart too.” Herbst looked at Zahara and said fondly, “You really were a sweetheart, Zahara.” Tamara stretched to her full height and asked, “What about me, Father?” Her father said, “Your enthusiasm about yourself spares me the trouble of an opinion.” Tamara said, “Have I no reason to be enthusiastic about myself?” Her father smiled and said, “If I say otherwise, you won’t believe me anyway. Now, what are your plans for today?” Tamara answered, “Whatever comes my way is already in my plans.” Zahara answered, “I came to attend to some business for the kvutza.” Tamara said, “And if a sister hadn’t suddenly been born to you, the business would remain undone.” Zahara said, “They would have sent someone else to attend to it.” Tamara asked, “Tell me, sister, did they at least pay part of your expenses?” Zahara said, “Whether they did or not makes no difference.” Tamara said, with a wink, “Father, explain to her that her kvutza costs you more than my tuition.”