by Неизвестный
“Do you know what I sometimes think? Perhaps what kept quivering inside me and impelling me all that time to come here was simply a yearning for natural beauty (after all, I never got to sit on a hill like this after a workday in New York), and also perhaps for a place to call my own, which as a Jew was something I had never had from the day I was born, not even under the marvelously sweet skies of my Ukraine with its marvelous shiksas…who might sneak up on you while you were swimming in one of its marvelous rivers and throw your Jewish clothing into the marvelous water, ha ha! So that for all I know—but what do you think?—I may have been living all that time with the hope…of finding a foothold, any hold, in our picturesque ancestral corner of Asia, in which Bedouin, the great-grandchildren of Abraham the Hebrew, pitch their tents to this day and bring to the well real camels as once did his bondsman Eliezer…and in which (which of course is more to the point) third- and fourth-generation children of Polish-Jewish moneylenders are learning to follow the plow. So that I thought that there, I mean here, how does Moses put it? ‘Let me cross over and see that goodly land, its fair mountains and the Lebanon’…”
“Well, what do you think now? Did you find your foothold?”
At once, however, I felt it was wrong to have interrupted him. My own voice sounded vulgar to me, a crude dissonance.
He absentmindedly plucked a doubled-edged blade of grass and began to roll it between his fingers.
Chapter three
I was telling you about…leaving New York.
“I suppose you know that I didn’t travel directly. There were a number of detours on the way. I spent a few days in London; I also made a side trip to Berlin, taking the train from Antwerp. I traveled fourth class, which was uncommonly crowded, and my state of mind at the time, if I remember it correctly, was uncommonly depressed too.
“This depression had accompanied me from London. It wasn’t caused by the Jewish ghetto there, although that can be depressing enough…but then I myself was coming from East Broadway and was hardly pampered in this respect. No, what depressed me was a specific incident—which had I read about in the newspaper I would have soon forgotten, but which instead I happened to witness with my own eyes…and at a time when my nerves were not in the best of shape…
“Let me tell you about it. In the filthy boarding house in which I was staying in a crowded, ground-floor common room there was a new arrival, a Jew from Bialystok, who was sleeping in a garret upstairs. His history was known to all of us: he had arrived in England with a large family, which having neither sufficient funds nor sponsors in the country was refused permission to land. When the ship docked in Liverpool he managed, by some Jewish ruse, to smuggle himself ashore, but his family remained aboard ship and was sent back to Germany in the end. This Jew was a bit of an odd fellow: broad-shouldered and thick-bearded, but a total child in his speech and behavior, total. Despite his desperate situation (he was a smith, and a Jew doesn’t have a ghost of a chance of finding metalwork in London) he joked and clowned all the time like a boy. He had us in stitches with his antics and his stories of how he had illegally gotten out of Russia and into England. This didn’t last long, though. By his second week the wisecracks had come to an end. He grew very quiet, and one night, after hearing that his family had been deported, he went up to his tiny room, shut all the windows, turned on the gas stove, and lay down. He was found in the morning in a state of perfect rest. But perfect.
“Well, you can imagine for yourself…I had been traveling night and day, by land and by sea, with so little to eat and drink that sometimes I spent hours at a time in a state of total apathy, without a single feeling or thought, an apathy that could only belong to a life already over (only now and then the thought would pierce my brain before melting there like an icicle: ‘From shore to shore…he has reached his shore…and I?’). Yes, you can imagine the state I was in when, after several days like this, by the end of which I had grown perfectly indifferent to the base physical part of me and its ordeal, I entered the wrong railway car by mistake—it was a few stations before Berlin—and found a Jewish family sitting in one corner by the door with all its possessions scattered over the floor. It consisted of a mother, a woman of about thirty-six or -seven whose dress and appearance I need hardly describe to you; her younger sister, a lady of about twenty with not unattractive but passive, lusterless eyes and a body that seemed gross and awkward although it was actually thin; and five girls, the eldest of whom could not have been more than eleven…yes, seven people in all. Their packages and bundles were more than I could count; the largest of them, it appeared, had been divided up so that everyone could carry his share of the load. A loaf of white bread that had been picked apart by somebody’s fingers protruded from one end of an unbuttoned pillowcase,
“ ‘Look, Mama, a Jew!’ cried the eldest child in Yiddish when she saw me.
“ ‘Ja, eine Jud-d-de,’ echoed the Germans in the car with a peculiar intensity, the tripled consonant sounding like both a groan and a laugh at once.
“The mother, however, did not seem happy to see me. Indeed, she had already reached the stage where even the possibility of such an emotion no longer existed. A Jew? Fine, a Jew. What more could the non-Jews do to her? Soon she would be in Berlin; of what use would another poor Jew be to her there? She didn’t even bother answering when I asked her where she came from.
“ ‘Brest-Litovsk,’ her oldest daughter answered for her.
“ ‘Not Bialystok?’ I asked.
“ ‘Who said anything about Bialystok?’ exclaimed the girl in an irritable singsong, whose unmistakably pungent Lithuanian accent was like a parody of adult speech.
“But I had already gone too far in my fantasy that this was the same family that had been turned back from English shores (and whose father had arrived at the one true shore) to abandon it now. The fact that the cities weren’t the same, that this family was traveling with an aunt whereas the other one wasn’t, made no impression on me. An embarrassed, ambiguous pity—is there any pity worse than that?—welled up for them inside me.
“ ‘I didn’t mean to ask what part of Russia you came from. I meant where are you coming from now.’
“ ‘But where are you coming from?’
“ ‘From London.’
“I’m from Yondon too,’ beamed one of the smaller children from over the top of a bundle, while the sunny eyes of her eleven-year-old sister (because her eyes did have sunshine in them, that I must tell you, although it was sunshine that you didn’t see at first, that you only noticed later) appraised me less harshly. You’re laughing? But I tell you, she was as pretty as white satin. And what wild, lustrous hair! I’m sure that no one had washed it or combed it for weeks…
“ ‘From Yondon,’ said the younger one again.
“As if I hadn’t known all along!
“So that now, neither the fact, which I soon discovered, that the woman had been a widow for years…nor that the reason for her deportation was not insufficient funds but a chronic eye condition…nor that her sister was turned back because a single woman could not enter England by herself…none of this made the slightest difference. My mind was made up: it was the same family! At once I hurried to bring my bag from the car I had been sitting in. I felt almost enslaved to them, as though it were somehow my duty to serve them. That’s nerves for you!”
“A very Jewish case of them,” I said sympathetically.
Chapter four
The fourth-day sickle moon hung high above the little colony when we got back. At first, after sunset, while we still sat on the hill, its large, thin, pale half-ring had waxed more and more golden with the gathering dusk until to its right appeared a brilliant first star that was followed by thousands of others all over the sky. The higher it rose, though, the more the golden moon paled.
We reached the main street. My friend’s one boot no longer dangled from his foot; he had taken it off in the darkness and was holding it in his hand. The sickle moon had widened and turned
to silver, no, to quicksilver, to silvery darts dipped in frozen smoke. Dim lights flickered within the colony’s houses, each a world in itself. Through shut windows the inhabitants could be seen spinning the daily cloth of their lives.
My companion grew agitated.
“Yes,” he said almost in a whisper. “You were right. Jewish nerves! What a people…and yet it can get used to anything. In fact it’s happiest in the ghetto. I don’t mean that literally…although in a certain sense…outside of the ghetto it simply isn’t at home. Take this peace here, this serenity, this beauty. Of course, no one is going to get rich from it. But if only one knew how to live as a human being, to suffer what human beings must and to live…this would be the place for it!”
“Despite what your treetops see?” I couldn’t help asking.
“Ah, them…”He stifled a sigh. “That’s true. But still…if only we were capable…I mean really capable of making something of this place. Because all places anywhere belong only to those who put their lives into them. Which isn’t to say…”
There was a long silence, after which he continued irrelevantly:
“You were talking about that family. How many there must be like it in port cities all over the world. So many stray sheep…or blind horses…all of them. Still, I would like to know where it is now and how it is faring. And the most curious part of it—are you listening?—was that to begin with they didn’t trust me one bit. I remember it perfectly: a few minutes after we had introduced ourselves I produced the remainder of a Dutch cheese from my bag and began to eat it in front of them so as to be able to offer it to the children—and their mother wouldn’t allow them to touch it! Well, I thought, she’s standing on ceremony, so I took from my pocket some small, Belgian copper coins that had holes in the middle of them, strung them like pendants, and began handing them out to the children, in order to rid them, as I saw it, of their apathy. (I suppose I must have imagined that the whole world was drowning in apathy.) ‘I really don’t need them…’ I apologized to the mother. She looked at me as at some kind of profligate and said, ‘If you don’t need them, what makes you think that we do?’ But the final blow was that when we finally reached Berlin—it was already evening—and I tried helping them with some of the bundles, which despite their small size were twice as large as the children who were carrying them, they, the children, began to scream for their mama.
“ ‘Watch out for him!’ the woman shrilled morosely at her sister.
“Luckily for me, though, something soon happened which proved to her that even if I wasn’t entirely in possession of my senses (in fact I was anything but) I was at least not a professional crook. At one point we had to pass through a narrow gate where one surrendered one’s ticket to an inspector. Since I was unencumbered by luggage I had already passed quickly through ahead of them when I heard her wailing behind me:
“ ‘God help me! I gave him all our tickets! What will become of us now?”
“ ‘Weren’t you continuing on to Russia?’ I asked.
“ ‘Keep an eye on our things!’ she called to her children without answering me.
“She ran to demand her tickets back from the inspector, who had no idea what she wanted and didn’t reply. A crowd began to form in a circle around them. A Prussian policeman appeared. The shouting woman became more and more frantic, until even my intervention seemed providential to her.
“ ‘Where were you bound for? For what destination were your tickets?’
“ ‘For Vienna! The tickets were for Vienna. I gave them to him…
I thought they must realize that they would let us go on…my God, what have I done…’ ”
“I approached the inspector and tried out every German lesson that I had ever taken on him. I had no idea whether he was being polite or curt with me, but in the end I did manage to establish that the woman’s tickets were good only for Berlin.
“What had misled her? It turned out that she had managed while in Belgium to obtain free tickets for Berlin from some Jewish charity (she had had in her possession a letter of recommendation from a relative of hers, a prominent official with another charitable organization in Jerusalem, which had stood her in good stead), as well as a written request to a sister charity in Berlin to pay her fare the rest of the way. In her naiveté, fully confident that she was now a celebrity who would be recognized all along her route, she had surrendered her tickets like the rest of us—until her sister pointed out that without them they could not travel further and she threw herself on the inspector. I tell you, she was the incarnation of the Wandering Jew!”
“And of nerves,” I put in.
He laughed and said:
“Don’t think that all this didn’t have its bizarre psychological effects on me either. After I had accompanied her the next day to the charity in Berlin, I spoke to the secretary there, a Teutonic Jew, perfectly correctly—believe me, my German was impeccable!—but a strange nervous tickle kept running through the soles of my feet and I found myself composing little vignettes in my head, from which I felt as though the brain had been surgically removed, such as the following:
“I: (Introducing her) Mein Herr! This unfortunate woman set out for London with her husband and five children…
“He: (Turning to face me) Was? With her husband? But it says here that she is a widow!
“I: (Pleading) Yes, a widow, mein Herr, a widow! She really is a widow now, because her husband, her husband…(The woman treads on my toes, compelling me to lower my voice)…You understand, the poor soul mustn’t be caused any more pain…but in her situation…her husband has reached shore…(She pokes me in the ribs, increasing my confusion)…I mean the father of these orphans died in the wilderness…that is, in London…
“He: (Losing patience with me, the devious Russian Jew) Was schwatzen Sie so?
“I: (Stubbornly, secretly desiring to punch his nose, as I generally desire to do when addressing important people) Mein Herr, these are the five biblical daughters of Zelophhad!
“She: (Beginning to scream at the top of her voice) You mustn’t believe him, your Grace, you mustn’t believe a word of it! This man who says he wants to help me is mad. I’ve been a widow for the past five years. A widow! My husband passed away in Brisk. In Brisk! Here, read this letter…”
This imaginary dialogue might have gone on and on had I not put an end to it with a gesture of my hand that brought him, the narrator, back to history.
Chapter five
And so the woman got her ticket to Vienna with another letter of recommendation to another charity there, and that was the last I saw of her in Berlin. (Speaking of Berlin, though, that city put me back on my feet. My second night there, to be sure, was spent at a meeting of the Hebrew language society at which a number of local authors delivered themselves of addresses; various other distinguished Hebraists were present too—not exactly my idea of great fun! But it snowed every day there…yes, real snow…and I tell you…if I weren’t afraid of exaggerating, I would say that I can still smell that snow to this day. I had eight whole days to myself there!)…Where was I? Ah yes, I didn’t see her in Berlin anymore. Just imagine how I felt, then, when no sooner had I boarded the ship in Trieste than my eyes fell on all those little packages and bundles! Next to them was my family, which had decided to visit its relative in Jerusalem.
“I could tell you things that happened on that trip, but I won’t try your patience. There was only one other Jew aboard ship beside the family and myself, a stout, stooped yeshiva boy in his mid-twenties who was a native of Safed, and who appeared to be, judging by the looks of him—he had those slanting, typically Oriental eyes that glisten like the skin of some wet, dark reptile—an apprentice rabbinical emissary or fund-raiser of some sort. He was returning to Palestine from Europe and appeared to be out of sorts, no doubt because business had gone poorly…and yet that isn’t what…listen: if you didn’t see that woman with her rheumy eyes, which were not her best feature, and her blistered lips, the toothless space
between which had turned black from rot, lying on her bundles in her white jaquette that was too big for her frail body and her kerchief, under which she forgot to tuck back the wisps of thin hair that occasionally escaped from it, looking like a sick cat with all her starving children crowding around her in their variously colored rags that hadn’t been parted from their bodies in weeks…well, you missed a heartrending sight. Add to that the freezing nights outdoors on the deck of the ship, the dry bread that was their sole diet, the cuffs of the sailors, the abuse of the other passengers, to say nothing of still further adventures—I don’t mind admitting to you that the splendors of the Mediterranean were not exactly foremost in my mind…
“The morning we docked in Jaffa I was in an especially eccentric mood. The night before that, which was the last of our voyage, we had been joined by a new passenger, a young man who had embarked the previous day in Port Said. This young man… . are you listening? Have you ever paid attention to the faces of some of our predatory Jews who haunt the cities of the Orient…I mean those cocky, energetic, wolfish ones with their oily black hair and their sharp little mustaches that curl up at the edges? Have you noticed how they prowl when they walk, as though stalking prey? I tell you, I can spot at a glance which of them are merely pickpockets and sharks, and which also deal in human flesh—and as soon as the person in question boarded the ship (I assure you, an agreeable, pleasant fellow to look at!) and ran his eyes softly over the oldest daughter of the family, I knew in exactly which category to place him…
“That whole oppressive night this newcomer kept reminding me of an episode that had taken place the day before. What was so oppressive about it? Well, you see, it was…or rather, I should say…yes, I remember: in Port Said the deck space was filled by groups of Egyptian pilgrims on their way to Mecca, so that there was not even room to sit anymore, let alone lie down. There was a tension in the air, yet together with it an odd feeling, a kind of carefreeness…what? Ah yes, the episode! Wait a bit and I’ll tell you all about it.