Mr. Mani

by A. B. Yehoshua

  —Fill my glass up, will you?

  —No, not with tea ... with brandy...

  —More.

  —Thank you. And that, Father, was how it began: with an encounter in a dark hallway near the service stairs, where a man from Jerusalem was waiting for me with a little candle burning in his hand. I still cannot get over his having that candle ready in his pocket—you would have thought he had spent his whole life being trapped in dark passages—indeed, he had two candles, one for me too, which I lit at once with great joy. To this day I wonder whether had Herzl not had that weak spell, we would have met. Or suppose he had had it and I had not run after the man? But I would have run after him—I was drawn to him—I would have found him—perhaps because from the very first he seemed to me, that stocky man from Jerusalem, the complete antithesis to everything around him ... most vital with a great shock of hair ... a rather handsome oriental gynecologist...

  —Antithesis.

  —To all of us. To you, for instance—to the other delegates—to all those German Jewish physicians...

  —I do not know.

  —A gynecologist. Actually, more of an obstetrician. Do you remember, dear Papa, how I too could not decide whether to specialize in gynecology or pediatrics? You were in favor of women; Linka thought I would do better with children.

  —Of course ... I can still change my mind ... it’s not impossible. But this man was a gynecologist through and through—an obstetrician with a maternity clinic in Jerusalem—and something of a public figure there as well.

  —About fifty. But though he could not have been much younger than you, forgive me for saying that he was still unspoiled—even childlike—yet cunning at the same time—although not in an ordinary sense...

  —A real clinic. Be patient and I will tell you about it...

  —Why should it be just for Jewesses? For Arabs too and Christian pilgrims—for everyone. But be patient...

  —A good question! At first we spoke in broken German. Before long, however, we realized that this would get us nowhere; at which point he suggested English, which, I already had noticed, he spoke as flamboyantly as a peacock, rounding his syllables like hard-boiled eggs in his mouth. He swore that it was the language of the future— which did not deter me from throwing up my hands and switching to Yiddish, a language I saw he had some knowledge of, although it came out a mangled Hebrew when he spoke it—so that I suddenly thought: well, then, why not Hebrew itself—it is certainly good enough for two Jews groping down a dark hallway! And that was how we started talking in Hebrew, which slowly started coming back to me in the darkness, so that I thought how proud you would have felt after all your efforts to drum a bit of it into me...

  —Real Hebrew, Father, as queer and rusty as it was, with the verbs completely unconjugated, just as you would find them in the dictionary. I must have confused my masculines and feminines too—and yet I must say that it was not unpleasurable to be using the language of our forefathers in that hallway, and even to joke in it a bit—because at first we kept losing our way and ended up descending some narrow little stairs to a wine cellar, each step of which did wonders for my command of the holy tongue—which he himself spoke in a guttural version of the language that sounded as if his throat were on fire. Eventually we realized that we had taken a wrong turn and climbed back up with our candles to the door we first had exited from ... only to discover to our dismay that it was locked. There was silence on the other side of it—perhaps Herzl had already been put to bed or whisked away by his friends for another session of Zionism. In any case, I was beginning to panic, because I kept picturing Linka out in the night, in that low-cut dress, looking for me high and low. Just then, though, we heard heavy footsteps, which belonged to a sturdy Swiss servant girl, who was on her way up to her room after a hard day’s work. She directed us through the labyrinth to a back street behind the Casino—and a most narrow and deserted street it was; you could not possibly have guessed from it what a mob of noisy Jews had just been there...

  —I already told you, Father. About your age—but unjaded and full of energy—a total antithesis...

  —In what sense? In every sense!

  —For example? For example ... do you think that you, Father—being the person that you are—a respected member of the community—the owner of an estate—the father of a not-so-young but quite capable doctor and a decidedly attractive young daughter— could one day fall madly—passionately—head over heels in love...

  —Yes, tormentedly in love...

  —You.

  —With a young woman—someone like—well, like...

  —Ah!

  —A devastating love that would make you leave everything—the estate—all of us—to follow your beloved to the—

  —No.

  —Well, then...

  —What?

  —Ah...

  —You?

  —You are jok—

  —Then why don’t you, dearest Papa? Yes, why don’t you fall in love a bit, ha ha...

  —That is so. What really do I know about you?

  —I can only tell you what I think.

  —That may be...

  —What does anyone know about anyone?

  —Hardly a thing

  —Two children—little ones—at my age he was even more of a confirmed bachelor than I am...

  —Of course he had a wife.

  —I will get to her.

  —I will get to her ... don’t be so impatient...

  —Haven’t I told you? Mani.

  —Moshe.

  —It is a common enough name in the Orient.

  —Oh, he was Manic indeed ... just wait until you hear it all...

  —Yes, the whole story—and nothing but the whole story—but please let me tell it in my own good time—it is a balm for my weary soul. Please let ... I feel suddenly gripped by such sorrow over his death!

  —I am not shouting ... forgive me. Anyhow, there we were in that empty, desolate street, circling round to the front of the Casino. By now he was telling me all about Jerusalem and his clinic, which he had come to Europe to raise funds for because he wished to expand and modernize it. Mind you, I was listening with half an ear, because Linka, I was alarmed to see, was not at all where I had left her. The nearby streets were silent except for a dimly lit tavern here and there in which—when I peered into them—I saw nothing but red-faced, drunken Swiss speaking sadly to themselves. I could have killed myself for leaving her! Where could all our Jews have disappeared to? And meanwhile this Mani kept tagging after me, so excited to have found out that I was a pediatrician that he could not stop talking for a second—about his Swedish nurse who was an expert in painless births and about some new idea of his for building up the blood of postnatal jaundice cases—three of his own infants, so he told me, had died of jaundice themselves—while I simply kept nodding at everything he said, listening as though in a dream. Talk of fright! I could not help thinking of all kinds of things that a person has no business imagining...

  —That she had been carried off ... that she had been misused...

  —I don’t know. Nor does it matter. I was very frightened. Linka and I had never been so far away from home, and by now I saw that there was no hope of finding her in those empty streets—and so I asked Mani to excuse me, because I was in a hurry to get to my boardinghouse, and I told him about my vanished sister, Well, at once he stopped his chatter and offered to drive me to my lodgings in his hansom—first the man had a candle in his pocket, now he had a hansom up his sleeve! He led me to a little back street—and there, Father, was parked a real carriage with a fancy black top and a coachman in red livery, a big-bearded fellow slumped sleeping on his seat. It was, it turned out, the gift of some Jewish banker in Zurich, who had refused to give Mani a donation for his clinic but had agreed to put a vehicle at his disposal to help him put the touch on other Jews. I can still see it, Father, standing in the dead of night on a street corner not far from the Casino with a black, thoroughbred,
high-legged horse that looked straight out of the Alps—it had the glitter of the moon in its big eyes! And it was starting there—from the moment I climbed into that carriage—that a straight line—I see it as though in a vision—ran straight to his death ... to that hideous tragedy ... although the truth, I tell you, is that we were only a pretext...

  —Because it is not conceivable that the seed of it was not already there, if only as a dry kernel that lies in the earth without knowing that it is a seed...

  —No, Papa, no. I said I would tell everything in order.

  —If I am being obstinate, it is only to keep you from leaving me here by this stove in the middle of the night once you have heard the end of my story. Because only the suspense can overcome your tiredness—can bring you to our boardinghouse in that wonderful hansom through the pleasantly cool Basel night—our horse clip-clopping briskly over cobblestones—up and down streets whose inhabitants were already enjoying a well-earned sleep. I still had no idea where all our Jews had gone off to, especially the younger ones; they could not have all gone to bed already. But soon we reached the boardinghouse, which was entirely dark—her window too, which made my heart sink, because that meant she had not come back. I was so afraid of the carriage driving off and leaving me a nervous wreck in the sleeping boardinghouse that I implored my Dr. Mani—who had by now finished telling me that he was born in Jerusalem to a mother who was born there too—to stay and keep me company. Not that he needed much imploring. He was only too happy to oblige. Perhaps he craved human contact after the indignity inflicted on him by Herzl. I burst into the lobby; shook the old grandfather of a concierge who was sleeping on a cot in the dining room beneath some gleaming copper pans on the wall—like red little suns they were, glinting in the night light; snatched the keys from his hand; and flew off to her room. It was exactly as she had left it—exactly as she leaves her room at home—her dresses everywhere—her underwear all over the floor. I felt knifed by anxiety. All evening I had gone about with the knowledge that it was her first day—not the best time for her to be gallivanting around...

  —No. Of her menses.

  —I knew. I always know. It does not matter. I—

  —I have always known since she was a girl. Since her first time...

  —Don’t ask me how. I know it—I feel it—I—I don’t know how but I do...

  —No. Never mind that, though. This is not her story but rather—

  —No, she is not. He is—that wandering obstetric fund-raiser—that Dr. Mani—who sat there with me in the dining room, facing a little oil lamp that old gramps had lit for us, already preparing for his doom—cozying up to his pretext—because that—although why us? why us?—is all we ever were for him. The more anxious for Linka I became, the more he sympathized. He was falling in love with her before he had even seen her—he did not have to see her. And I was beginning to detect a certain oriental softness in him—a rather pariah-like patience—coupled with an ancient and obscure grievance—together with a knack for latching onto you and quickly putting himself in your shoes. He was still carrying on about his clinic and his attempt to raise funds for it. I could see that he wished to take my measure—perhaps as a financial or medical partner—because the minute I told him about our estate, he grew quite ecstatic over his good fortune at having run into not only a Zionist pediatrician, but a rich Zionist pediatrician in the bargain...

  —As we were driving in the hansom. I believe I expressed my pleasure at the horse’s light gait and compared it to our own heavy drays that Mrazhik can never get to shake a leg...

  —From there it was but a step to the flour mills and the forest. He listened openmouthed, as if trying to gulp it all down.

  —No, I told him some medical tales too. About deliveries in the villages. How the Jewesses scream and the Poles sob...

  —But they do. Every last one of them.

  —You never asked.

  —They positively bawl, every one of them.

  —The Jewesses? As loud as they can. It is to make sure the baby hears them and remembers to be nice to its mother after all it has put her through. But the Poles sob. The devil only knows why—perhaps, ha ha, it’s for shame at having brought another Polack into the world...

  —Idle chitchat, yes. But what was I to do? I was swamped by anxiety, and Mani was the straw I clutched at to take my mind off it. And he did seem a cordial and charming fellow, busily fusing himself to his pretext while the mountains turned purple outside...

  —Yes, I am back to pretexts. You will have to put up with it, dearest Papa. That is the word and I had better stick to it if I ever mean to get any sleep...

  —No, not yet. Because just then I heard her laughter in the quiet street, a laughter that had a new note in it. It sounded like some ticklish little carnivore’s. A minute later she walked in with a new escort—no longer the children of pogroms and Pobedonostsev but three middle-aged pans, two from Lvov and one from Warsaw—a half anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist Pole who had been sent by the latest right-wing newspaper to find out if there was any truth to the rumors that the Jews were indeed thinking of packing their bags...

  —Narojd Ojcizna.

  —That is a tune we are going to hear more and more of. An insolent clown of a fellow he was, slightly tipsy. He bowed extravagantly to me and took the slyest liberties with all of us, and especially with Linka, draping his white cape over her bare shoulders—and not for modesty’s sake, I assure you, but to hide the stains she had gotten on her dress in some tavern. She was quite flushed—her dress was creased—her hair was wild. She seemed flustered too by all that gross male gallantry—but believe me, Father, she was enjoying it. At once she began to throw on the table packs of cigarettes, resolutions, pamphlets, reports, manifestos—the whole cornucopia of documents we delegates had been crammed with—and then flung herself at me like a whirling dervish. How could I have gone and left her like that? Why, she had had to put these charming gentlemen to the inconvenience of searching all over for me! I clenched my fists, utterly humiliated. I almost hit her, Father. From the moment I heard that laughter of hers ring out in the night, I wanted to thrash her—I, for whom such a thought...

  —You know I have never lifted a hand against anyone. But now I scarcely could control myself—I wanted to thrash her, plain and simple—I, who had never touched her in anger, not even when she was a little brat—not even when you went off to Vilna for Grandmother’s funeral and left me with her for two weeks. In no time we were quarreling in front of everyone, right in the middle of that sleeping boardinghouse—even old gramps, who must have smelled the liquor on the breath of that Zionist goy, came tiptoeing over for a look...

  —Everything. Don’t ask. Everything! And most of all, that outlandish white shawl on her shoulders, draped over that most scandalous dress, which I destroyed the next day. All at once she had become the grand lady. You should have seen her holding her hand out for those Poles to kiss—that childish little hand stained with ink, which her admirer from Warsaw put his lips to with unconcealed desire—she was laughing, she was all in a whirl—a once neatly closed little pocket knife that had suddenly sprung open with all its blades...

  —No, no, don’t say anything. I was not looking to make a scene. And in any case, at that very moment Mani appeared from his dark corner, stepping out from beneath the burnished copper pans, and I presented him, embarrassed as he was—my pudgy jack-in-the-box—my antithesis—to everyone. “Straight from Jerusalem, gentlemen,” I said furiously, “from Jerusalem itself!” You could actually feel that mysterious city blow through the room like a fresh breeze. The Polish pans grinned—Jerusalem?—you can’t be serious!—while Linka turned to my antithesis with a warm glance. She held out her hand to him and he kissed it (it was then I first noticed that he had a special, an endearing way with women) most nobly and shyly. “He speaks English,” I told her. “You can speak in English to him.” And so she did, without the slightest hesitation—a soft, musical English it was too, like a swee
t oatmeal porridge—to which—amazed but appreciative—he replied in that peacock talk of his, the language of the future, as he called it. The Polish gentlemen stood by grinning like idiots, and old gramps wanted to know what it was about us Jews that made us speak four different languages in as many minutes. And it was then, dearest Papa—or at least so I remember it—that I was so seized by the desire to travel to Palestine with that man that I made up my mind to give our Linka a taste of the real thing—to chuck her into the dark bosom of Zionism itself. Jerusalem? Then let it be Jerusalem!

  —Let it be Jerusalem!

  —Yes, and the sooner the better. I could not wait to be off, if only to get all those pans and their ilk off her trail. And just then I thought of you, Papa, and I felt my gorge rise...

  —Because I knew you would never understand and would say no.

  —In plain language, that you would not allow us to go.

  —Well, it did have to do with you ... or so I thought...

  —But if we had asked permission, you would not have given it...

  —No objection? But just look at yourself now...

  —It’s a fact. You are furious. You are...

  —What?

  —You were not angry?

  —I don’t follow you.

  —My imagination?

  —What?

  —No. Where—

  —You were glad? But how come? For what reason?

  —Proud? How odd ... proud! You truly felt that?

  —Truly? And to think that when we cabled you from the post office in Venice before boarding ship, I was shaking like a criminal...

  —Then Linka was right. I misjudged you ... Linka knew better than I did...

  —“Papa will only go through the motions ... in his heart he’ll be on our side...” But how—

  —Still...

  —That was all.

  —I was wrong—I never thought—I am quite bowled over. Dear, dearest Papa, forgive me! And here I had already decanted your anger into me—I have gone about all this time with your accusing glance boring into me from behind—I have asked myself, “How could you have done this to Papa and Mama and gone chasing camels and donkeys in the desert when you should have been finding yourself a wife in Frau Lippmann’s boardinghouse...?”