Shira

by Agnon, S. Y.

  Henrietta came in, carrying the baby. Zahara was quick to take the baby and give her mother her chair. Henrietta asked, “What were you talking about? I seem to be interrupting.” Tamara said, “On the contrary, it’s we who are interrupting your lunch preparations. What, for instance, is Mrs. Herbst preparing for her daughters’ lunch? Sarahke, hush yourself and stop shrieking. Can’t you see there are serious people here dealing with a weighty question?” Henrietta got out of the chair, took the baby from Zahara, and began cooing to her. Tamara said, “Bravo, Mother. You sound as if she were your first child. Sarahke, tell us, whom do you look like?” Zahara said, “I’m going out, Mother. Do you need anything from the market?” Henrietta said, “Don’t be long, and bring back a good appetite.” Zahara said, “I’ll try, Mother. Goodbye, all you good people.” Tamara said, two and a half times, “Goodbye, goodbye, and bring me back some ice cream.”

  Chapter nineteen

  The girls had gone, each to her place, and the household resumed its routine. Henrietta deals with the baby, the wetnurse, all the household affairs. Still, she manages to run around for certificates. Oh, those certificates! It seems that if you reach out, they’ll give you one. But when you get to the office, there are none, and the official you saw yesterday, who promised to give you one today, isn’t there either. There – in Berlin, Frankfurt, Leipzig, all the cities of Germany – brothers, sisters, in-laws, uncles, and aunts are rotting away, and, if you postpone bringing them here, they will be erased from the earth. Every report from there is worse than the preceding one. Sad letters, imploring letters, reproachful letters arrive daily. They reproach us for being complacent, for not lifting a finger to rescue them. Henrietta is miserable. She cries and is full of reproach – not for the English who have closed the country, nor for the malevolent officials who do their bidding and withhold certificates. She reproaches her relatives who reproach her, as if their immigration were in her control and she were obstructing it. Unaware of the runaround and abuse she endures, they repeat what they already wrote yesterday. Once again, Henrietta dresses up, runs to the Jewish Agency, to the immigration offices, to those who rule the country and, in a most cordial manner, pleads gently, ever so gently, on behalf of her sisters and brothers. She no longer distinguishes between herself and her family; she has taken in their sorrow and is one of them. Henrietta is advised to bring in her relatives on the sort of certificate that is backed up by a bank account of one thousand lirot to guarantee each immigrant’s support. The Herbsts have no such resources, even if they were to sell the clothes off their backs. And besides, there are so many relatives that they would need countless thousands. Nonetheless, Henrietta does not relent. Julian Weltfremdt and Taglicht, Herbst’s two friends, agree to be cosigners. Henrietta runs to a savings and loan bank to borrow money for deposit in Barclay’s Bank. The manager looks at the signatures and rejects Taglicht’s for, being a man of meager means, his signature is worthless. As for Weltfremdt’s signature, the bank manager clucks his tongue and says, “Weltfremdt, Weltfremdt…. Which Weltfremdt?” “Dr. Julian Weltfremdt.” If she could get Professor Ernst Weltfremdt to sign, they would accept the document and lend the money. Of course, you know Professor Ernst Weltfremdt all too well. He would give you an offprint and sign it, but a financial note – never. Still, rather than trouble her husband, Henrietta deals with most of their business, leaving him free to work. Manfred sits in his study, working.

  Herbst has already prepared his lectures for the fall term. When he finished this task, it seemed to him that he had done everything. Herbst did not remember Professor Weltfremdt’s suggestion that it was desirable for a faculty member to publish an occasional book or, if not a book, at least an article. Some things are desirable and some are not. Manfred Herbst’s desires are in abeyance. He produces neither books nor articles, yet he assists others who produce books and articles. They all accept his help, assimilate his comments, acknowledge his editorial skills. Since they are the authors, the books are theirs. And if not for them, Herbst would have nothing to comment on. Still and all, to be correct, they thank him. Herbst doesn’t mind if comments offered generously to friends are not acknowledged, nor does he blush with pleasure when they thank him. If you like, this is apathy. Or, if you prefer, it’s because his mind is elsewhere. And where is it? Believe it or not, it’s with Shira.

  It is Manfred’s way to help Henrietta with the daily chores. So much so that when she goes into town, he does the dishes, keeps an eye on the kerosene lamp, takes the laundry off the line, and, needless to say, watches the baby and chases the cattle sent into the garden by Arab shepherds, which exposes him to Sacharson’s monologues, designed to prove that Arab hostility is not directed against Jews in particular, for his garden is invaded too, although everyone knows he is thoroughly Christian. Whatever Herbst does is done, not out of actual will, but in an attempt to keep himself at home. Were he to go into town, he would stop at Shira’s, and he doesn’t want to stop at Shira’s. What does this mean, he doesn’t want to? Not an hour passes without his thinking of her. Still, although he can’t control his thoughts, he can control his feet. And, as long as he can control them, he keeps them at home, despite the fact that, were he to go to Shira, he and his conscience would be clear: if a man’s wife doesn’t offer him comfort, he has the right to do as he likes.

  Henrietta doesn’t offer Manfred comfort or intimacy, and Manfred no longer attempts to be intimate with her; she, because of her concerns, and he, because she has trained him not to bother her. Twice a day they eat together, discussing their relatives in Germany, the university, the students and teachers. At the core of the conversation are their daughters, who no longer need them. Zahara lives in Ahinoam. She is accepted by everyone and seems to feel she belongs there. When Zahara first said, “I’m going to a kvutza,” her parents laughed and said, “When you see the privation and hard work, you’ll come running home to Mama.” But she didn’t come home to Mama. She works hard – in the fields, in the garden, anywhere – enjoying her work and eating what she produces, and even her parents benefit from her labor. She sends eggs from the kvutza, each one the size of an ostrich egg. She sends tomatoes whose equal cannot be found in any Jerusalem market and flowers that charm the eye, give off a lovely scent, and have such sweet names. In our textbooks, flower names are translated from Latin, French, and a variety of other languages. Children in the kvutza give them Hebrew names, which I’m inclined to believe go back to the third day of Creation. Zahara has even found herself a young man in Ahinoam. We don’t know who he is – either that tall Avraham whom they call Avraham-and-a-half, who carried her in his arms when she sprained her ankle, or Heinz the Berliner, who manages the kvutza’s business, or yet another one of the young men who live there. When Henrietta met Manfred, she linked her soul to him for the rest of her life. In this time and place, a young girl doesn’t know to whom to cling. So much for Zahara.

  Tamara still hasn’t finished her studies. She plans to live in Tel Aviv until she gets her certificate and a teaching job. When does she study? We wonder about that; one more wonder to add to the seven wonders of the world. In the summer? She spends all day at the beach, swimming, sunbathing, exercising, sailing, doing all sorts of delightful things on land and sea. In the winter? She goes hiking, to get to know the length and breadth of the land. When she’s in Tel Aviv, she sleeps all day. As for the night, she spends most of it in one of the cafés. Tamara and Zahara are sisters, with the same father and mother, yet they are not related in looks, height, or dress. But they do resemble each other. I will tell you something that happened to me in this connection. Once, in the winter, I was in Kfar Ahinoam, where I met Zahara. That summer I went down to Tel Aviv to bathe in the sea, where I happened to meet Tamara. I said to her, “I saw you in Kfar Ahinoam.” She stretched to her full height, laughed her bronze laugh, and said, “I grew two heads taller in the interim.” I looked at her, saw my error, and laughed with her. I have related all this to demonstrate that, thou
gh they seem dissimilar, they are actually alike. Not only these two, but all of the country’s youth: our young men and women are all alike. When you and I were young, we studied in one room, in one school, from one Gemara text, hoping to resemble our fathers and teachers. But, in the end, we were different from them and different from each other. Here, the schools are all different, the texts are different, and the students end up resembling one another.

  I will get back to the heart of my story. Actually, I have nothing new to add. Everything is in order in the Herbst household. Henrietta deals with her concerns, and Manfred deals with his. They eat together and converse with each other. When she is free from her chores for a while, he reads the news to her and adds details excluded from the paper. Many things are happening. Every day Jews are killed in secret as well as in public, and every day there are black borders in the newspaper. At first, when we saw a black band in the paper and read that a Jew had been murdered, we left our meal unfinished. Now that there is so much misfortune, one sits at the table eating bread with butter and honey, reading, and remarking, “A Jew was killed again, another man, woman, child.” We sit with folded hands, yielding to murder, proclaiming, “Restraint, restraint!” They murder, kill, incinerate, while we exercise restraint. As for the authorities, how do they react? They enact a curfew. Our people are contained in their houses. They don’t go out lest they be struck by an arrow, for those who shoot the arrows roam freely, unleashing their weapons anywhere. You can’t say the authorities aren’t doing their job, nor can you say we’re not doing ours. We exercise restraint and show the world how beautiful we are, how beautiful the Jewish ethic is: even when they come to kill us, we are silent.

  Manfred sits with Henrietta, reading her the news of the day, explaining England’s strategy, along with the importance of the Arab factor, listing all our disappointments from the Balfour Declaration to the present. Manfred and Henrietta are not politically knowledgeable, and I doubt if Herbst has read a single book about English policy, not to mention Henrietta, who doesn’t even read the newspaper. But since the riots of 1929, even they pay attention to what is going on in the country. With Jews being murdered every day, anyone who lives in the Land of Israel hears his brother’s blood crying out to him from the earth, and he too cries out. The Herbsts, who were remote from politics, began to dabble in them, like every other Jew, when the trouble became more constant.

  Manfred and Henrietta are sitting together. He reads and she listens; she questions and he responds, stimulating her with his responses, so that she asks further questions. Manfred says to Henrietta, “You think those who hate Jews love Arabs and those who love Arabs hate Jews. But, in fact, when they denounce Zionism, they denounce us, hoping to win the Arabs.” Manfred, whose ideas lead to memories and whose memories lead to ideas, recounts earlier history, written and unwritten, provocative newspaper articles and virulent sermons delivered in mosques, inciting Arabs against Jews. Henrietta marvels at Manfred’s ability to fathom politics and to put things together. Henrietta accommodates her opinions to his and makes his thoughts hers. If Henrietta understood Manfred in other areas as well as she understands his remarks on the delusions of politics, they would both be better off.

  The Herbsts’ position among their Arab neighbors in the Baka area began to deteriorate. Before 1929, Baka was settled by Jews who lived with Arab neighbors in peace and harmony. They rode in the same buses, the same pharmacists filled their prescriptions, and good wishes winged their way from a Jew’s mouth to an Arab’s ear and from an Arab’s mouth to a Jew’s ear. When a Jew greeted an Arab, he greeted him in Arabic, and when an Arab greeted a Jew, he greeted him in Hebrew. It was not mere lip service but a sincere, loving exchange, so that there were those who prophesied that Arabs and Jews would become one nation in the land. How? This could not be spelled out, but what reason doesn’t accomplish is often accomplished by time. The power of time exceeds the power of reason, even of imagination. Suddenly, all at once, came the riots of 1929. Jewish blood was spilled by Arab neighbors who had lived alongside them like beloved brothers. Fear of the Arabs fell upon the Jews, and anyone living in their midst ran for his life. All the Jews who lived in Lower Baka or Upper Baka fled and never returned to their homes in Arab neighborhoods.

  When calm was restored, several families picked up and went back to Baka. Those who found that their homes had been plundered retrieved their remaining property and settled somewhere else. Those who found their homes intact went back to live in them while they looked for housing in a Jewish neighborhood.

  Herbst was the first one to go back. On Sunday, after calm was restored, Herbst emerged from the hiding place in which he, his wife, and several neighbors had taken refuge that entire previous day and night. He met Julian Weltfremdt, who asked, “What happened to your books?” He said, “They were either flung into the street or burned.” Weltfremdt said, “I see a police officer. Come, I’ll tell him you left a roomful of books and you want to see if they survived.” They went and told the officer. He invited them into his car, and they drove to Baka.

  They arrived in Baka and found that the house and study were both intact. The officer saw the books and was astonished that one man could own so many volumes. He was charmed by Dr. Herbst and said to him, “You and your family can go back to your house today, and I will guarantee your safety.” Three or four days later, the Herbsts were back in their house. Manfred returned because of his books, and Henrietta returned because she was attached to the home she had put together with her own hands. Mrs. Herbst had found a mound of trash and transformed it into a delightful home.

  The Herbst family lived in an Arab neighborhood in a lovely house in the midst of a lovely garden, as if the riots had never occurred. Kaddish was still being said for those murdered in the Land of Israel, and the land was still in mourning for these victims, yet the Herbsts’ neighbors were already coming to “Madame Brovessor Herberist,” one to borrow a utensil, another to bare a troubled soul: her husband was threatening divorce because of her repeated miscarriages. She asked Madam Brovessor to take her to a Jewish doctor, as she had done for other neighbors whose homes were now teeming with children, for Jewish doctors deliver live babies. Once again Herbst’s neighbors anticipated his greeting, as in the old days; in those days, however, they greeted him in Hebrew, whereas they now greeted him in Arabic or English. In the interim, England had sent many troops to the Land of Israel, and the English language was becoming widespread. Before the riots, there were four hundred English soldiers in the land; since the riots began, you couldn’t make a move without running into an Englishman.

  I will skip the years between the disturbances and the unrest (1929 to 1936), recounting events that occurred from 1936 on and relating them to Manfred’s story. Suddenly, without the leaders of the community and its great men being aware that a catastrophe was imminent, there was a new round of violence known as the riots, in which Jewish blood flowed unrestrained, and there were so many murders and massacres that no self-preserving Jew would venture out at night, certainly not a Jew living among Arabs, for his life would be at risk.

  In the Talmud Tractate Gittin, we are told that Tur Malka was destroyed because of a rooster and a hen, that Betar was destroyed because of a chariot peg. What was it that brought on these riots? A straw mat. They tell a story about a Polish rabbi who went up to Jerusalem and prayed at the Western Wall on Yom Kippur. He gave an order, and a straw mat was hung up to separate the men from the women. Arab leaders complained to the English governor. The governor sent soldiers to demolish the divider. Jewish leaders called a protest meeting. Arab leaders incited their people against the Jews. The Arabs came out to demolish, eliminate, annihilate all the Jews. Blessed is the Lord, who didn’t abandon us.

  Manfred Herbst sits at home nights and doesn’t go into town. Which is a good thing, for, if he were to go there, he would stop at Shira’s, and he doesn’t want to stop at Shira’s. In other words, he does and he doesn’t want to, and, since he
is ambivalent, he assumes he really doesn’t want to.

  A person can’t give up going into town night after night – because of a friend he needs to talk to there, or for some other reason. There are countless reasons. Most important: anyone who turns away from society will find society turning away from him. As for the dangerous roads, it is dangerous to go on foot but safe in a car, even in a bus, since the buses have been equipped with iron window bars that keep out the rocks Arabs fling at passengers. The way it works is this: one puts off compulsory trips and undertakes the optional ones. Since an optional trip is optional, it ends up becoming compulsory. One night Herbst happened to be in town, which did not gratify him. So he decided to go to Shira.

  He didn’t really want to see her. On the way there, he began to wish that she wouldn’t be in, that her house would be locked, that some passerby would detain him. As he approached her house, his legs began to tremble with desire.

  He arrived at her house, saw a light, and remarked in despair, “She does seem to be at home.” He began to mutter, “Let her be sick, let her not be able to get out of bed to open the door for me.”

  He stood at the entrance to Shira’s house like a man whose mind is on a woman, who is wondering just what he sees in her, why she is in his mind, and what moved him to go to her, who concludes that, since he’s there, he might as well go in and stay just long enough to say hello, then take leave of her and go home.