by Неизвестный
“I…just a minute there, slow down…why, you must be Leivik Hagzar’s son, is that right? Whew! Why, your father and I used to play tag together when we were small boys. On Goat Street in Mogilev, where we lived.”
Did he know Leivik!
“But…just a minute…tell me, wasn’t Rabbi Shmulka, may he rest in peace, your uncle? Of course he was.” Did Hagzar remember him? That was a fine Jew? Who could forget the funeral he was given when he died? Not an infant stayed home in its crib…
Hagzar sat on the bench for nearly an hour, answering Simha Baer’s queries and listening to him reminisce. The mellower her father’s mood grew, the less inhibitedly Rosa laughed and the more her eyes shone with pleasure. At last, enjoying his own joke, Simha Baer inquired which synagogue Hagzar attended and had he said his evening prayers there—adding without waiting for an answer that it would have broken Rabbi Shmulka of Mogilev’s heart to have lived to see his nephew’s sinful ways. What a Jew that man was, what a Jew!
Simha Baer rose, excused himself, and told Hagzar to come by more often.
Then Hagzar and Rosa strolled up and down the street, in which the mud had dried. Rosa’s spirits were high. Laughingly he twitted her that God was less wicked than she, since He at least had sent him Hanna Heler for his loneliness, and when she laughed back he talked about Hanna some more. Did she know that the two of them met every day and never had a dull or cross moment? Then he discussed his friend Carmel, whom he hoped he would not disappoint. She listened keenly as he told her about Carmel’s life, about the relations between them, and about his pleasure that his old friend from heder, and later, from Vilna, was soon about to arrive…
Besides which, nothing really was new…
Subsequently he began to visit the house again daily as once he had done; yet now he made a point of first saying hello to Simha Baer. Generally the latter could be found sitting between the table and the window with a floppy silk skullcap on his head, peering over the tops of his glasses at a book that he held away from himself at arm’s length. He welcomed Hagzar warmly, laid his book on the table, carefully folded his glasses, placed them on the book, pulled out a handkerchief, blew a trumpet blast into it, and commenced by declaring “We-ll now” in the tone of an experienced man of affairs who is adept at getting along with the “younger set.” Then he would chat with Hagzar about this or that latest fashion, spoofing it with a knowing air and humorously quoting scriptural chapter and verse, or citing rabbinic texts, in proof that it was nothing new. Finally his hand crept back toward his glasses and he familiarly ended the audience by replacing them on his nose.
“Well now…I don’t imagine that you came here in order to be preached to by an old man like me. If you’re looking for the sisters, you’ll find them in the cloister…”
And, pleased with his recondite jest, he returned to his book.
In the “cloister,” the large room that had been their father’s until he had recently bequeathed it to them in order to banish their “reign of terror” from the drawing room, Hagzar would find the three sisters together with Hanna Heler, who had taken to slapping him sonorously on the back when they met. Uncomfortably he tried making small talk with Rosa; yet she sat with her face twitching moodily and refused to respond. Then he sang along with the others, sprawled out with them on the beds, talked until he was hoarse, and returned home in the early hours of the morning to grunt, spit, mop his brow, and grunt some more. Only the comforting thought of the approaching spring and of the imminent arrival of his friend could induce him to go to bed in the end.
At last Carmel came. In the beginning, Hagzar spent whole days and nights with him. Carmel lay on his back amid a wreath of blue smoke that spiraled up from the fat cigarette that spluttered between his lips, while Hagzar sat by his side, or paced stammering and laughing up and down, both enjoying his own excitement and wishing that there were less of it. Now he saw his long stay in town in a new, rewarding light that made him feel much better about it—although each time he asked Carmel to tell him about Europe, an urgent, almost physical desire arose within him to finish his work and depart for there at once. The more casually he tried listing the obstacles that had detained him so far, the more annoyed with himself he became at his inability to explain them, especially as they all had seemed so perfectly clear beforehand…
Yet afterwards, when Carmel became a steady guest in Simha Baer’s house, where he liked to loll on the couch puffing lazily on his cigarette while Rose crossed her arms beside him, the lips chill-cornered on her dear, sad face, and Manya sat across from them, hardly speaking but whistling often at odd times, and Ida half lay on the edge of the bed with a wistful longing in her eyes, Hagzar could feel his skin crawl. His head and chest ached, and he talked such a streak of loathsome, incurable rot that he had to escape to Hanna Heler’s in the end, cuffing her nose to make her laugh and then returning home to grunt and brood some more. Once he found Manya’s tutor there, talking loudly and horsing around. He pinned Hanna’s arms behind her back and taunted Hagzar, who sat behind a large newspaper reading an ad placed by a doctor in Vilna.
Later that same day he stood by Ida’s bed with a glass of water in his hand. A smell of valerian had been in the room when he entered; Manya bent over her sick sister, rubbing down her chest, and told Hagzar that Rosa was not in. Ida laughed and cried, too weak to open her eyes. She gasped like an animal and made delirious sounds, until a sudden tremor seized her and she cried:
“To hell with it! The ship is sinking…and I…only wanted…”
Manya was a nervous wreck. Seething with pent-up anger, she burst out:
“She went traipsing off just like that…with Carmel!”
Whereupon Hagzar felt a pain like a blow in his chest. The hot blood rushed to his face and stung his eyes. What was he doing here? He stood reeling beneath the memory of Carmel’s smug smile, of Hanna Heler’s arms pinned behind her, of the boisterous laugh of Manya’s tutor as he held them. The ad placed by the doctor in Vilna flashed before him. Then came mighty Vilna itself with its halls of learning, its bookstores, its public library in which he had worked, its long, monumental nights of writing in his room there, its companions whose dreams had resembled his own. He felt that he was going to choke. Something hummed in his ears and he could hardly see. Dazedly he laid the glass on the chair and stumbled toward the door. Not until he was out in the fresh air again did his vision clear. His temples throbbed and his heart went on pounding as he walked down the street to the end of the town and continued beyond it. He ambled slowly now, staring with melancholy detachment at the long, endless railroad track that stretched flatly out before him, quite faint and desolate in the heat of the day.
Translated by Hillel Halkin
Yosef Haim Brenner
Nerves
Chapter one
A perfume-like smell, which came from the low clumps of acacia trees, or “mimosas,” as some liked to call them, scented the air of the small Jewish colony in southern Palestine. In the expanse of sky before us, a golden shaft from the setting sun at our backs gilded a cluster of faint, calm clouds; other clouds, as calm and faint, were limned not with gold but with long, narrow swathes of orange embroidery. At its far end the sky shone in docile light with the silvery-black sheen of myrtle leaves. The colors changed from one moment to the next. They ran together, blended, renewed themselves, and vanished in the end.
Next to a lone, straight cypress tree, which rose from behind the acacias and some yellowish prickly pears that were stiff with needles and their usual heavy turgidity, I and my companion—an ordinary-looking man of about thirty with a set of strong sloping shoulders and a coarse-featured, acne-studded face, who because he was ill had not gone to work this September day, the heat of which was worse than midsummer’s—turned from the path we were walking on and strolled toward a chain of hills that ran along the gleaming horizon. The distant ruins of an ancient castle ten or twelve miles to our right seemed suddenly close by.
; We walked silently for a while on level ground. The dry, sere fields still spoke of summer, yet in the graying vistas out over the corniced cliffs there was already a hint of the approaching fall. My friend turned to look at the plain behind us, where the low, red sun continued to blast indefatigably away. The trees at the colony’s edge were far from us now and indistinct.
“Those trees…” Though he broke the silence abruptly, the low pitch of his voice, ironic and serious at once, softened the suddenness of it.
“Eh?”
“I was saying…those trees…do you see the tops of them? If I were writing a travel journal, or a ‘Letter From Palestine’ of the kind that’s in fashion nowadays, I’m sure I’d begin: ‘Our Jewish colonies: a fleeting yet irrepressible smile quivers through their still too few tree-tops. . .’ ”
“Quivers?” I repeated the word, a favorite of his when playing the nature lover. Generally he hedged it with sarcasm, but now it was impossible to tell whether this was the case or not.
He swallowed the bait. “Exactly! I’m talking about the tops of those trees. How old would you say they were? Not more than twenty-five years, I shouldn’t think. The oldest trees must remember…yes, twenty-five years ago there was nothing here at all…nothing but sand and dunes…”
“But why do you keep coming back to the tops of them?”
“The tops, is it? Because they can see a long way. Perhaps they even see the great cities from here. (Did you know, by the way, that your innkeeper’s son has the good fortune to be off to America next week?) You know, the great cities, the ones beyond the sea…”
“What about them?”
“What about them? Millions of people made them. For centuries men built them, rebuilt them, accumulated treasures in them…so that…so that today they stand on solid ground. If you’re born in them, you’re somewhere. There’s even a grandeur about them. Do you remember those monumental railway terminals? Those magnificent parks?”
“So?”
“Whereas here we live in self-imposed poverty. A village barely twenty-five years old…and lived in by whom? Huh. Why, just today your innkeeper said to me: ‘I should let my son grow old in this hole like myself ? I’d rather see him dead…’ ”
A bird whose Hebrew name neither of us knew flew brilliantly by, flashing green against the blue sky, and disappeared.
“But the sad thing about it,” he went on in his secretive voice, which was tinged not with irony at all now, but with a peculiar sort of earnestness, “is what our treetops see, or should I say foresee, right around them. Let’s say they can forget the great cities. Let’s say they can’t even see them and needn’t compare them with our pitiful Jewish village. They still can’t help noticing their surroundings. And I tell you, my heart goes out to them…my heart goes out to anything that is forced to put forth branches before it has time to strike root…”
“A prophecy?”
“Not even an editorial. Surely we’ve seen for ourselves.”
“Seen what?”
“Villages! The old ones, I mean, not those here. Those that belong, that have their own sun to shine and their own rain to fall on them, that aren’t a quarter-of-a-century old…and whose inhabitants aren’t exiles from their father’s table either…who…still taste the fleshpots of Egypt in their mouths…but who…well, they may be filthy beggars themselves…oh, I’m sure of it: they are! But at least they’re not the outcasts of the earth. When I think that those treetops are doomed…and always, always, the same wretched Jews on the run…what misery!”
The evening gong sounded from the village.
“And do you know what else I wanted to say?” He was in a talkative mood. “Here, more than anywhere, (do you think that on our way back we might rest for a while on that little hill?)…here of all places, where our ruin, the ruin of our people, is most obvious…here I’ve had some of the best days of my life…which…which at times I’ve actually thought was taking on direction, some meaning. If only they didn’t blather so much back there about the sweet land of our fathers! I’m sure that’s why new arrivals in this place are always so depressed…it’s like waking from a dream. To this day—it’s been a year and a half now—I can’t get those first moments out of my mind: so this is what our promised land is like!”
After a moment’s silence he went on: “Nerves? You say it’s just nerves?” (In fact I had said nothing at all.) “Well, maybe you’re right…”
On our way back a while later, after the sun had set, we sat down to rest on the hill, which was covered with sparse grasses and a hedge of more thick, jointed prickly pears. As always our conversation jumped from one thing to the next. When it returned to the subject of nerves and their symptoms, however, my friend stretched out one booted foot in front of him, matched it with a second that was wrapped in rags, and began to speak in an uncharacteristically emotional tone. The story that he for some reason chose to tell me did not follow in any evident way from what had come before. Indeed, it began with a few vague sentences that were hardly coherent at all; yet little by little it showed signs of making sense—or so, at least, he thought, for he kept encouraging me each time he paused in his tale:
“Don’t get up yet… . Stay a while longer…you see, I’m over it now… . I’ll get over this rambling too… . One gets over it all in the end…”
Chapter two
It was on my way over here from New York. Funny, how I say ‘it was’—as though there were really an ‘it’ here that ‘ was’… . But in any case…in any case…‘it was’ is the wrong way to begin. If I’m going to tell it in such a fashion I should probably say ‘there were’—because this much is true: a number of things did happen, and perhaps the whole point of it was…that in some way they were connected…even if for the most part I must say that I didn’t understand them…but one never does when traveling with people…that is, with people who are traveling…does one?
“It happened on my way over here. I had decided to come to Palestine. Why? What for? What did I think might happen here? That’s all beside the point. After all, I’ve been through all this with you before. Like anyone who has bothered to think a bit about his own life, I had long come to the predictable conclusion that its riddle was insoluble, and that a sequel to it would emerge only in my last moments…if at all…which is to say, that there was no sequel. And it wasn’t just the sequel: my life until then made no sense to me either…nor did the rest of the world, or what I was doing in it, or what I might have been doing previously or had I been somewhere else (look at that silvery-gold moon, how it quivers! What day of the Hebrew month is it today?)—to say nothing of who had stuck me in it to live on its earth and breathe beneath its sky, to warm myself in its sun and shiver from its cold (mind you, I’m not cold now, it’s just a manner of speaking), to stir each time another of its springs returned and feel sad again with each dreary autumn. (Excuse me for sounding poetic!) But the strange part was this: there was absolutely nothing I could do without thinking about that last destination after which there was nothing…that had to come and of which I was constantly aware; that destination that was followed by an infinity of dreamless sleep from which one never awoke and that utterly blotted out all else. (But why are you laughing? Is it at my language or simply at my having taken all this so seriously? Anyway, watch out for that prickly pear, will you, before you get stuck.)
“In a word, that last destination, after which there was neither heaven nor hell, love nor hate, beauty nor ugliness…and that still, as hard and stupid as life was, one never wanted to come…because it was the last thing that would come…So you see, it wasn’t as if when I decided to come here I didn’t know all these…these shamefully trite things (shamefully trite and yet true!)…And I also already knew (after all, it wasn’t really so long ago, was it?) that even though I knew them, I was like all sentient beings forced against my own will to obey my own will…yes, my own will…And…like everything, sentient or not…yes, like you too…to somehow fill that terrible, i
nsatiable void that can never be filled until the end…if then…because who really knows… .
“For eight years I lived in New York (you’re not sleeping? you’re still listening?), and before that in the Ukraine where I was born. In New York I worked in a sweatshop, casting buttons into the void, that is, sewing them onto tens of thousands of pairs of pants every month. (I assure you, I can’t imagine a more disgusting place or job!) The fact is that I knew perfectly well that all those buttons could hardly make a dent in the void, to say nothing of filling it…though at the same time I was aware that this was not the fault of the buttons, and that if instead of them I tried casting oranges picked in the groves of the Promised Land (assuming that there were oranges to pick when I got there and that I didn’t come down with malaria), the Void of Fear, to call it by its proper name, would not fill up any faster…
“Yet still I came running here…because, you see, I was still in thrall to life…ach, what foolishness! I mean to the possibilities of life, do you understand? That is, to the hidden, veiled power of life that rules us against our will and that sometimes manages to make our quest in life seem almost pleasant…Which meant that I couldn’t, didn’t, want to free myself of the seemingly irrational desire for something else, for different possibilities, other places…which is of course the trick life plays on us in order to stay attractive…So that what I knew, which was substantially no different from what was known by the author of Ecclesiastes, was one thing, and the course taken by my life quite another that had nothing to do with what I knew…that had to do with certain simple necessities: buttons, paychecks, distributing radical newspapers, a pair of shoes here, the torments of sex there, every hour of every day something else…