Shira

by Agnon, S. Y.

  Until that article appeared, he had produced nothing in Hebrew, so he treated it like a book. He ordered offprints, had them bound, and distributed them to colleagues, including some Jewish scholars abroad. As long as he was busy inscribing these offprints and mailing them out, time was passing but he didn’t notice. When he was finished, he didn’t know what to do.

  He did, actually, know what to do. But, because he was discouraged, that was how it seemed. It goes without saying that he has notes to sort out and, even more important, to classify. If he was going to put his book in order, it would be good to have the notes arranged by subject. Right now, a great deal of effort is being wasted. He often copies material that has already been copied once, because the notes are in a mess and it is hard to confirm whether or not a particular item has been copied. Similarly, he often finds something that is worth copying and doesn’t copy it, assuming it has already been copied; later, when he goes through his papers, he discovers this is not so, and, if he still wants to copy it, he has a hard time tracing either the source or the subject.

  He would occasionally go back to his box of notes, taking out a note, putting another in, comparing texts, adding marginal notes, et cetera – including them, not because of their content, but because of pedants and polemicists who, should he omit a reference, would argue that, had the author seen what So-and-so wrote in such-and-such a book, he would not have arrived at such a misguided conclusion. Hence those footnotes and citations that add nothing but are inserted to silence critics, a gratuitous display of erudition.

  While dealing with these papers, Herbst sometimes formulated fragmentary ideas he didn’t hesitate to write down, in some cases briefly, in others at length. He was sometimes caught up in his writing, as in the days when he wrote his first book, when ideas flowed, along with the ability to express them and the documentation to support his views. When this occurred, he mourned the early days, which were gone, never to return again. Herbst forgot that then, too, there were arid times. Now it seemed that those days had been altogether good.

  Herbst was distressed about the work that remained undone; about Shira, who avoided him; about himself – about the fact that he needed to get rid of Shira in order to be free to work. It can’t be, Herbst would say. It can’t be that I’ll spend my days and years thinking about women. Many times Herbst cried inwardly: What does she want from me? Actually, it was not that she wanted anything of him; it was he who wanted her. What do I want from you? I want to see you, that’s all. Better still, not to see you. If you were to go away, or if I were to go somewhere, I would be rid of you. I would be free. Isn’t it enough that I’ve wasted two years because of you? And that verse “Flesh such as yours / Will not soon be forgotten” played itself in his mind.

  The Herbst household was in good order. Herbst had his concerns; his wife had hers. Herbst concerned himself with his books, his lectures, his students, and his major work on burial customs of the poor in Byzantium, while Henrietta concerned herself with the needs of the household – cooking, baking, sewing, ironing, shopping, health care, family matters locally and abroad. In addition, she tended the garden and tended her little girl, Sarah, who was no longer a baby in a crib but was not yet ready for nursery school, which is just as well, for there is no nursery school in Baka. The closest one is in Talpiot, and how could anyone find time to take her there and pick her up? Herbst’s salary is barely adequate to pay for household help. The Herbsts really ought to have moved to a Jewish neighborhood. In fact, they should have done so right after the riots of 1929 and all the more so now, when Arab bands are wreaking havoc, and Arabs are like wolves to Jews. But, being so fond of their home and garden, the Herbsts are reluctant to move. Anyone who has toiled over a house and garden will not abandon them easily. And you know what an investment Henrietta has made in her house and garden. She rented a heap of rubble and transformed it into a fine home. Henrietta ignores danger and lives as she did when she first came to Jerusalem, when the high commissioner, who was Jewish, used to go to the Hurva Synagogue on a special Shabbat, read from the Torah, and sit between the two chief rabbis on a throne adorned with the verse “Suffer not a stranger to sit upon His throne.” After the service, he would attend a reception in his honor, where the country’s leaders sang his praises over a full glass of wine. And the German consul, who sent his children to a Jewish nursery, used to ask Dr. Ruppin to intercede on his behalf when he needed a favor from the high commissioner. The German consul’s brother-in-law, who was a frequent guest in Jewish homes, used to praise all the Carmel wines. At night, after Shabbat, Hasidim would dance down from Mea Shearim to the Old City and from the Old City back to Mea Shearim, and young men and women would stroll all night, wherever they wished. If an Arab met a Jew, he would say hello. If they were acquainted, he would say more – and in Hebrew, so that those who presumed to foresee the future predicted that in another generation the Arabs would become assimilated. How? It remained for the future to fulfill their heart’s desire.

  And so the Herbst household is in good order. Nothing has changed except for the help. Sarini is gone, and Firadeus has taken her place. Firadeus is alert and agile, dark and attractive. Her eyes are like two sweet raisins, and she never says a sharp word. She is the embodiment of humility, enhanced by modesty and reticence.

  Henrietta is pleased with Firadeus’s work, Manfred is pleased with her manner, and Sarah prefers her to all her dolls. Firadeus is only sixteen, and she supports six people: herself, her mother, her mother’s mother, her father’s blind father, and Manawa, the madwoman they found on the road from Persia to Jerusalem, as well as her little brother, Ziyon. He was born the day her father was killed by an Arab rogue when he was on his way to dump Talpiot’s garbage. Ziyon the father, who was Talpiot’s garbage man, is still remembered fondly by the local housewives; if he found something that had fallen into the garbage by mistake, he would return it. He was mentioned by the chairman at the first meeting of the Talpiot Committee, and all the members stood in silence to honor his memory. How can six souls subsist on Firadeus’s meager wages? While most of her friends sit around telling fortunes, fussing with their hair or their jewelry, Firadeus sits with her mother, wrapping pamphlets given to her by a gentleman with a stiff collar who lives near her employer and pays her half a grush for each piece. If he gives her a hundred pamphlets and she doesn’t return them all, he’s not particular. He pays for the whole lot, realizing that neighbors come by, see writing in the holy tongue, take it to read, and don’t return it, and she, being so young, doesn’t dare to speak up to her elders and say, “Don’t take it.” As was already stated, Firadeus is quick, conscientious, and altogether dependable. If she is told to do something a certain way, that is how she does it. Sometimes even before there is time to say anything, it’s done. Firadeus has another fine quality: she sees everything. I’ll give only one example. The Herbsts were in the habit of having their servants eat with them. The first time Firadeus ate with them, Tamara kept tapping her nose to call her parents’ attention to the girl’s repulsive table manners. In a very few days, Firadeus learned to handle a knife and fork more skillfully, perhaps, than Tamara. Herbst and his wife are not ethnographers; they’re not engaged in studying the different communities. But, when they first arrived in the country, they used to go to the Bukharan streets on Shabbat and holidays to watch the people in their colorful garments. Similarly, they used to take tourists to see the Yemenites in their synagogues. Having had their fill, they no longer concern themselves with all the tribes of Israel to be found in Jerusalem and are no longer able to distinguish the ethnic groups from one another. I would not be mistaken were I to say that Herbst is more attuned to the various Germanic peoples in Jerusalem than to the tribes of Israel. Still, when he hears these peoples being maligned, he responds, “You can say what you like about them, all but the Persians.” There is one problem with Firadeus: sometimes she shows up and sometimes she doesn’t, because her employers live among Arabs, in a neighborhood
ruled by hoodlums, where every stone is waiting to be flung at a Jewish head. When Firadeus comes, she takes on all the housework, and her mistress sits writing letters to relatives in Germany. If she doesn’t come, all the work falls on Henrietta, since Tamara is inept when it comes to housework.

  At this time, Tamara had an opportunity to visit Greece. How? A group of university students was going on a scholarly expedition. When Tamara heard about it, she wanted to travel too, to breathe the air of other places, never having been out of the Land of Israel except once, when she toured the cities of Lebanon, which she considered part of her own country. Tamara wasn’t a student and couldn’t qualify as a scholar. Her knowledge of Greek culture could be inscribed on the tip of a lipstick without making a dent. But she was lucky. One of the women backed out, and there was room for Tamara. The cost was minimal, since both governments offered large discounts for students. Also, Mother Henrietta managed to skimp on household expenses to make it possible for Tamara to go.

  Tamara “spoiled” her parents with picture postcards. Whenever she found a post office, she sent a card. To spoil them further, she adorned her cards with rhymes about her companions, about the food, the drink, the person who dipped his cheese in wine, and so on. Henrietta reads them and remarks, astonished, “Tamara is no poet, but look, Fred, the rhymes seem to roll right off her tongue.” Manfred laughs. “Your good taste has vanished, Henriett. You read Stefan George, and you’re enthralled; you read some jingles, and you’re equally enthralled.” Henrietta says, “Still, it’s a miracle to have such control of a language that you can make rhymes.” Manfred says, “Rhymes without meter are lower than the lowest prose. Tamara reminds me of Professor Lemner. When he utters a Greek or Latin proverb, he drowns it in a sneeze so his mistakes won’t be noticed.”

  One day a letter came from Tamara with an amusing story. In Athens, a wealthy young man wanted to marry her and had approached the professor in charge of the group to ask for her hand, because Athenian Jews follow patriarchal practices and wouldn’t dare ask a girl for her hand without her guardian’s permission. Henrietta laughed, as if it were a joke. Manfred didn’t laugh. Manfred almost fainted. Until that moment, Manfred had never noticed that Tamara was old enough to marry. Manfred didn’t think his daughter Tamara was different from her peers; but, like most parents, he forgot what it’s like to be young. Herbst was pleased that his daughter was superior in one respect: she wasn’t involved with those who want both sides of the Jordan as a Jewish state. The subject of Tamara has come up again, and again I am ambivalent about telling her story. Since it is too long to write with one drop of ink, I will leave it for now and get back to where I was.

  When he was done with the offprints, Herbst felt listless. He barely made it back to his desk. As usual on such days, he did a lot of sitting and a lot of smoking. The tobacco smell neutralized the book smell, and he himself was neutralized by the clouds of smoke. When Henrietta came into the room, she had to clear a trail with her hands. When she went to open a window to let in air, she found it was open, but a pillar of cigarette smoke trapped at the window prevented the air from flowing in or out.

  The air suited his thoughts, which were first and foremost about Shira. He himself – which is to say, his work, from which he still considered himself inseparable – came second. Third was Henrietta. His thoughts about Henrietta were roughly these: In any case, Henrietta’s lot is better than that of her relatives in Germany. She doesn’t live in fear – of police, of informers, of her husband being suddenly taken away and returned as ashes in a sealed box. She even has a garden with vegetables and flowers, as well as a chicken coop, all of which Henrietta had dreamed of in Germany when they were preparing to leave. She used to say, “I’ll go to Palestine, find some land there, and plant a garden, like the pioneers.” Someone else occupied Herbst’s thoughts: his eldest daughter, Zahara. But she wasn’t as persistent a presence as Shira, his work, or his wife, though she was perhaps closer to his heart than the others. His thoughts about Zahara were entwined with thoughts about Tamara that remained somewhat amorphous.

  The cigarette smoke was occasionally invaded by the fragrance of the garden, the rooster’s cry, a chirping bird, Henrietta’s footsteps, little Sarah, or a student or colleague. Herbst deals with each one of his callers in terms of his nature and business, then sees him out and returns to the box of notecards, saying, “Here’s another note, and yet another.” The notes extended in several directions without coming together. The author of these notes is drawn in several directions too, but he doesn’t pull himself together either.

  Herbst was like the poet who lost his baggage on a trip and was asked if his shadow was lost too, a question that inspired him to write a wondrous tale about a lost shadow. So it was with Herbst. Having lost the desire to deal with his notes, he became interested in something that, for him, was like a wondrous tale. That poet was privileged to write Peter Schlemihl, whereas Herbst wasn’t privileged to fulfill his wishes. I will nonetheless relate his wish. I will also relate the chain of events that led him to fix his attention on a subject other than his academic work.

  In the realm of thought, this is how Herbst functions. He takes on a subject, considers it from various angles, moves on to another subject, and finally goes back to the beginning. Now that he had lost the desire to deal with his papers, he pondered his book, which was not being written. He thought about the delays and obstacles, about Zahara, who was living in the country, and about Henrietta. In the end, his mind was on himself again. He pictured himself leaving the city, leaving his home, going to a place where he was unknown, with no one to distract him from the work he was about to undertake. For he meant to do something new. He meant to write a play about Antonia, a woman of the court, and Yohanan, a nobleman in the capital. Several days earlier, he had intended to engage in research, as usual, but it had suddenly occurred to him that this was beyond what the researcher could handle, that the material itself yearned to fall into hands other than a researcher’s.

  Despite their weight and value, the data peered at him with eyes that were crafty, shrewd, and clever; resistant, hesitant, fearful. If they had had words, they would have said roughly this: What do you gain by making an article out of us? Another article and yet another. You’ve already produced enough articles. He watched, listened, understood. Suddenly his heart felt pinched with painful sweetness, the kind a poet feels when he comes upon something that asks to be put in a poem. Dr. Manfred Herbst was resolved to write a play about the woman of the court and Yohanan the nobleman. Henceforth, nothing was as dear to Dr. Herbst as this play. If not for Shira, the project would have dominated his heart, and he would have written the play.

  Thus far, his work had been nourished by what others provided, data from documents and the like. Now he would be nourished by his own spirit and creative imagination. Needless to say, he would no longer have to refer to books or copy notes to store in a box. He would no longer need to amass references and would have no use for scholarly apparatus. He barely managed to repress his sense of superiority, for he already viewed his academic friends as exploiters who eat fruit planted by others.

  Herbst envisioned himself sitting and writing the play. Scene after scene unfolds, and the leading characters – Antonia, a woman of the court, and Yohanan, a nobleman – are engaged in conversation, which he overhears and records on paper.

  It took a while for Herbst to be persuaded to write the play. I’m not a playwright, he thought. That’s not my profession, he told himself. At the same time, he was aching to try his hand at it. Aware that most people, unless they are poets, fail in this sort of endeavor – that, when they try to tell a love story, they become sentimental – Herbst was discouraged. But he was determined to write the play. And what would become of his notes? They would help him make the play authentic. So far, all he had was the story as conveyed by the writers of the time, but he was counting on precedent. Anyone who devotes himself totally to a task will not come away empty-handed
.

  Meanwhile, he investigated a pile of documents and discovered things no one else had noticed that were relevant to the story of Antonia, the woman of the court, and the nobleman Yohanan. He was thrilled with these discoveries and tested his imagination to see what it would add. But imagination doesn’t always respond, not to everyone and not on demand. Never before had the material refused to comply. Whenever he put his mind to it, a research paper would take shape, seeming to order itself, the pieces falling into place so that there was a beginning, a middle, and an end – all in language suited to the subject, without academic jargon, to which even renowned scholars are not immune.

  Herbst went to the window and stared at the trees. They were blooming, as usual, as if of themselves. Actually, one should not forget that Henrietta had a hand in this, and, in fact, so did he; they both tended the trees, hoed, and watered regularly. Neither he nor Henrietta had worked the land in their youth, but the soil was there, so they made a garden. Though no parable is intended, this reflected Herbst’s feelings toward the play. But another feeling, about old age, insinuated itself. Was it old age that drained his energies and disheartened him? So this was why he hadn’t hurried back to Shira after that first night, and, because he hadn’t hurried back, Shira withholds herself from him now.

  Turning away from the window and from the trees, he began pacing back and forth. Finally, he stood still, leaned over to press a cigarette into the ashtray, and either took another one or put the one he had just discarded back in his mouth. Then he took out the atlas in order to research the locale of his play. Atlas in hand, he cried out in amazement, “Tamara is in Greece. What does she know about Greece? I doubt she knows as much as the lowest-level student in a German high school. What do they teach here anyway? Who was it who described Apollo arrayed in tefillin? As an ideal, it’s defective; as a joke, it’s equally defective.”