—Linka and I spoke in Yiddish; the Manis spoke Spanish; Linka and Mani used English; with Mani’s wife we tried French; and everything came in a wrapping of Hebrew.
—Mani’s wife knows some French. Linka tried talking with her to gauge the extent of her defeat.
—She had been sapped by her husband’s fantasies—and being somewhat older than he was, she did not sense the threat that had arrived from abroad, neither then nor in the days that followed. She made no effort to follow our talk. She sat there listening as though to an inner drone in her own soul—and indeed, Linka and I must have seemed mere children to her, slightly older than her own, no doubt—why, we had even finished our schooling!—but children nonetheless, perhaps orphans of some sort who had been entrusted to her husband in Basel as his wards—the proof being that, when it was time to find us a place to sleep, she proposed putting us both in her children’s beds, which were in an alcove next to her bedroom. Mani whispered in her ear—Linka and I murmured something or other—and a better solution was found: the girl was moved to the grandmother’s bed, Linka was put in the children’s room, and young Mani was sent to sleep with me in the clinic. The Swedish midwife was instructed to surround us with partitions and to screen us off from each other.
—Of course. It was a great mistake, Father. We should have gone to a hotel, especially since I had invaded the privacy of that dark, crowded house with its unattractive furnishings quite enough. But now it was Linka who wanted to live on the inside; she was ecstatic with the knowledge that she could go below when she pleased to watch a new birth; and without giving it another thought, she went straight to the children’s room, changed into her nightclothes, and climbed into one of the two beds. Shortly after, the rest of the household drifted off to its rooms too, leaving me alone at the dinner table to cut furtive slices of the remaining hallah, since I was as hungry at the end of that symbolic meal as I had been when it started. I heard Mani climbing the stairs, no doubt thrilled by the thought that his latest love had become a little girl who slept on the other side of the wall from him I did not wait for him but went in to see her and found her in bed, glowing, her eyes wide open, a large, colorful Turkish doll—a sort of belly dancer in silk pants—above her head, on which she wore a Turkish fez in place of a bonnet. “Forgive me, Linka,” I said to her. “I was wrong—tomorrow we will find other lodgings and move out of here.” She sat bolt upright. She was already burned by the Palestinian sun. “But there’s no need,” she murmured. “It’s not that at all. There is lots of room here—we must not hurt his feelings—he cares for us dearly. I’m telling you, I know—let him play the host.” I said nothing. I could feel her inner tumult, her new hope that had sprung from seeing his wife and children for herself. I sat down on her bed and tried to say something solemn—something about our journey having come to an end—but could not think of the words. “Well, then,” I said, “here we are in Jerusalem at last.” “Yes,” she replied at once. “Here we are. How happy I am!” It was the most simple, the most touching declaration—all the more so for having been made in that down-at-the-heels little room, surrounded by a confusion of children’s things—for having been so perfectly forthright. “How happy I am!” I smiled at her indulgently. I knew that her happiness had nothing to do with Jerusalem—of which she had so far seen nothing—and everything to do with something else; it was no more than an amusing illusion, I thought, that would soon come to naught. “And you, Efrayim?” she asked earnestly, too big for that child’s bed that was gazed down on by the Turkish doll. “Are you happy?” I laughed. “Happy? As if happiness were possible for me—as if there ever has been a time when I was happy. Happy for what? For that premature baby? For being here? We have nine days to see this place and then we had better get ourselves safely home, because I promised Mama and Papa to return you in no worse condition than I took you in.” She frowned at that. “Of course, of course,” she murmured short-temperedly, “we shall see.” I had the feeling that she was listening to something outside the door—to our host, Dr. Mani, who was standing there eavesdropping—portlier than ever in an open shirt, minus his jacket and tie—waiting bleary-eyed to take me down to my quarters, where the indefatigable midwife had made my bed. She had washed and changed clothes too, and she greeted me affably in bare feet and showed me to my bed, which was set apart from the women’s beds but not by much, as if some obscure formula had determined its position vis-a-vis them. Next to it, behind a partition, was little Mani, who had not yet settled down for the night; he was standing on his bed in a black shift, the sort of tunic that Arab children run about in, and now he ran to his father unrestrainedly, pulling him away from me and behind his partition, where he clung to him with both arms. I could hear him scolding him in that Spanish of theirs, which is rather like a watered-down Latin. Here he had been waiting long months for him, pining away—and what does the man do when he finally comes home but show up with two monopolizing strangers! I could sense the doctor’s impatience; his answers were brusque, for he wished only to be upstairs again, in the little room where his new daughter was lying. It was then, without warning, that the boy broke out crying bitterly, in a dry, harsh sob that raided the silence in the clinic. It was an inconsolable sound. I rose and went over to him—he stopped crying and hung his head angrily—and so I turned to Mani and chided him for forgetting the most important thing of all. The black horse! “You see,” I said to the boy, “your father wished to bring you a horse.” At first he would not listen but merely pressed his nose against the wall and waited for me to go away, only half-understanding my Polish Hebrew. Little by little, however, the story enchanted him; he began peeking over his shoulder to watch me describe with my hands how the gray sack was tied around the horse’s head, and how it was eased into the hold of the ship, and how it behaved so wildly there that it had to be disembarked in Crete and galloped off to the freedom of the mountains. The boy’s tears dried; he was listening intently now, asking his father the meaning of words that eluded him; at last, his sorrow once more got the best of him. “But where is that island?” he asked, quite desolate to think that the horse was in Crete when it might have been in Jerusalem. “Can’t we go there and bring it back?” he begged. Mani translated for me, and I promised that on our way home we would ransom the horse from the island and send it to Palestine. That gradually calmed the boy down enough to go to bed. A prematurely old little child!
—Yosef was his name. Since Beirut a day has not passed without my thinking of him. Even here, in this dark corner—in the middle of the night, thousands of miles away from Jerusalem—I feel a physical pain when I mention him, as if I had been shot. Does he know yet that his father is dead? And what else does he know? I picture him roaming past the mirrors and partitions of the clinic, which must be slowly going to pot, hating and blaming Linka, but also me. Is he capable of making a distinction between us? Will he ever understand that we were only an instrument in his father’s hands, a wretched pretext for a profound passion that I must fumblingly grope to comprehend for the rest of my life—that we too were the victims of...
—Go back where?
—When? How?
—What, all over again?
—No, no. I have already been there—I have had enough—it is someone else’s turn...
—But what? In what language? What could I write? What could I say that would not make his anguish only worse?
—No, Father, no. It is a bad idea.
—Money? What kind of money?
—For what? It would be an implicit admission of guilt ... why should I make it?
—But what guilt? What are you talking about, Father? I ask you: what? You have taken leave of your senses! What guilt?
—No, wait—wait—don’t leave me, Father. Father ... wait—wait—I beg you—don’t leave me to toss and turn in bed all night as I did that first night in Jerusalem—a Jerusalem I already was in and had not even entered yet. All I had seen of it was that lone, amazing clinic and the stars
in its sky—which nevertheless were enough to make me realize that I too—but why should I not be?—was almost happy, even if I would never have admitted it to Linka—happy that the earth was not rocking beneath me and that I could turn my thoughts away from my heaving insides and back to the world again—to the voices I now heard—to the quiet steps and whispers above me—to the soft, barefoot movements of the Swedish midwife—who, it seemed, never slept—as she made the rounds of her sleeping prepartums to see which of them would be next. I lay there for a while like a doctor on night duty; rose to ask the Swede for a stethoscope to listen to the newborn baby’s heart; returned to my bed; gazed out the window at the fading stars while watching the darkness slowly lift; and listened to the unexpected sounds of the dawn—at first the sweet ring of a church bell, as if the little church of St. Jodwiga of Oświ[ecedil]cim. had followed us to Jerusalem, and then, close on its heels, the clear voices of the muezzins...
—Those are the Mohammedan cantors who call the faithful to prayer. And although I was no Mohammedan, I jumped at once from my bed with the realization that—even if it was more heard than seen—dawn was breaking. I washed my face, feeling very hungry, and made up my mind to discover Jerusalem on my own and get to know it for myself rather than as a hostage of my doctor, whose intentions had begun to seem even more nefarious since crossing the threshold of his house. I stepped outside into broad daylight, pointed myself in the direction of some sounds that I heard, and struck out across the fields, passing some little house now and then until I arrived at the gray ramparts of the city and disappeared through a gate into its narrow streets. From that morning on, I walked the old city’s streets every day, my feet skipped along by its cobblestones. It was a city that from the very first I understood perfectly—which is more than I can say of any of your other Jews, Zionists or not. I was there.
—I was. And I got to know that stone womb that is the mother of us all.
—No, not so much the inhabitants. Jews are the same everywhere. The only difference is that there the Mohammedans take the place of the Poles; the Turks—of the Austrians; the donkeys—of the horses; and the nimble black goats—of the hogs. Sometimes, with their little beards, they made me think that they were ancient Jews who had disguised and shrunk themselves after the destruction of the Temple in order to stay on in Jerusalem...
—I wandered from place to place, footloose and missing nothing, thoroughly learning the city, in which the distances are astonishingly small. From our Wailing Wall to the great mosque with its two domes is no more than a few steps; from there a short walk will bring you to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and not far from that are the synagogues and the holy places of the Armenians, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Protestants. Everything is jumbled together—it is a bit like entering a large shop for religious artifacts whose shelves are piled high—the believer can choose whatever catches his fancy...
—It is quite simple. You walk down a street that is no more than a few feet wide and there it is—a large wall—or buttress—however you wish to call it—grayish and covered with mosses. It is quite amazingly like the photograph you have hung on the wall of your office, Father. Perhaps the same Jews even pray there. I found it most appealing, Papa dear.
—Its formal simplicity—its improvised originality—its refusal to make any false promises or foster any illusions. It is a last stop of history, no less than that board in the train station—a blank wall with no open-sesames or hidden crypts. What more can I tell you, Father? What else? It is perhaps the ultimate dam, built to hold back the Jews in their restless proclivity to return to their past. “Halt!” it says. “No Passage Allowed Beyond This Point.”
—Only at first. I won’t deny that I stood there dismayed for a moment—even stunned—gawking in disappointment. But soon enough I got over it, stepped up to the large, cool stones, and—ha ha ha—even kissed them, would you believe it? A lazy atheist like myself ardently kissing not just one stone but two! The Jews and Jewesses praying there saw that my head was uncovered and sought to comment but did not; and so I tarried for a while, thinking of this and that, until I stopped an Arab boy carrying a tray of golden little loaves and bought them all for a thaler. I stood there eating one after another—they were wonderfully tasty—I shall never forget the taste of them. From that moment on—as if I had chewed the stones and they were made of dough—my memories of the Wailing Wall do not come without the fragrant taste of freshly baked bread...
—A narrow lane. The approach is dark and dank, very intimate. On one side of you is the ancient, holy relic with its huge stones, and on the other, a cluster of homes with flapping laundry and crying babies. It is an impossible but quite real combination. I would have lingered there longer had not the ram’s horns begun wailing all around me, which made me think of you in the gray fields of Poland, waiting for some sign of life from us. I was directed to the sarwiyya, the Turkish governor’s house in the Christian Quarter, and from there I sent you my second telegram—the one that Mama says only made you even more worried. But why?
—But what did it say, for goodness’ sake?
—What was unclear about it? I was even given a Turkish telegraph operator who knew German, and we made up the message together. I remember it word for word: We are well. Will start home after Yom Kippur.
—We are happy?
—But I expressly wrote “well”! Who could have changed it to “happy”? Perhaps it was that Turk’s own idea. But even if it said that, why be so alarmed by it?
—What do you mean, that was all?
—Let me see it. This is what you received?
—But the last words are left out. I paid good money for them—that postal clerk made off with them! Unless they fell out of the wires along the way—or else the Poles were too lazy to copy them...
—How do you know?
—I had no idea you could do that.
—And when you traced it back to its point of origin, what were you told?
—They confirmed it? But how could they have? What a scoundrel! Why, I paid for every word of it...
—Two piastres.
—Of course. I would never have kept you in the dark like that, without even letting you know...
—What a devilish business—he went and shortened it on his own! And he thought my visit in Jerusalem was too short—he could not stop telling me about the wonders of the city...
—But...
—My dears—you had every reason to worry—We are happy—an odd telegram indeed! A person might have thought ... oh, my poor loves ... and yet even then...
—The word “happy”?
—So it could have, Papa dear. Taken captive by our own happiness ... a wonderfully subtle thought. Bravo!
—Indeed, he was our captor, that oriental gynecologist. There was a power in him—he could move you to do anything by his presence, as confusedly soft as it was—as full of surprises too, disappearing and appearing without warning. I had already noticed how he worked his will with his family—even the boy, who sought to fight back, was constantly squelched. The Swede was all but enslaved to him, and I had seen for myself how Linka trembled all over when he flung that gory infant into her arms, thrusting upon her—a stranger from afar—a most intimate partnership. How could I have known that his effusive—his soft, imaginative, and prankish nature—was unreal—unnatural—nothing but an illusory reflection, like those of the swiveled mirrors in his clinic—of the soon-to-surface destructiveness within him?
—Yes. There was even a danger of Linka’s being ensnared to work for him as a nurse, to turn herself into a nurse-concubine...
—There is nothing insane about it...
—It is not a perverse thought. Nothing was impossible by then. Why, I myself had begun to feel that morning a well-being as blissful as nirvana, a primitive, tidal oneness with that diaphanous light. I wandered among the bright colors of the fruit stands, the rug dealers, the coppersmiths, accompanied by the savage wails—now rising, now choking�
��of the ram’s horns, in seventh heaven to be on solid ground, so brimful with happiness that the telegraph clerk who saw it decided to rewrite my cable without a date of departure, which made you here—holding the innocent gray telegram in your hands thousands of miles from Jerusalem—instantly alert to the threat that was implicit in the elimination of those words that never reached you. Is that not wondrous?
—Yes, dearest Papa, a threat—the threat of happiness—that is a threat too. And so I knew that if I wished to remain in Jerusalem as a pilgrim and nothing more, albeit a most secular one, my first task was to distance myself from Dr. Mani and his harem and to find lodgings of my own, preferably in a pilgrims’ hostel. It did not take long to ascertain that there were indeed such places everywhere, little hospices that offered bed-and-breakfast, and since I inquired after one run by Englishmen, who Mani believed spoke the language of the future, I was directed to a place near the Jaffa Gate called Christ’s Church, which combined a hostel with a biblical seminary. Its director was a handsome, ruddy-cheeked Scotch priest who saw at once that I was neither an Englishman, a pilgrim, nor anything resembling either, but a plain ordinary Galician Jew in need of a room, which made him regard me benevolently and usher me into an inner courtyard off the chapel, where he showed me a dark chamber that looked out on a green ravine and had a single bed. I did not ask for a second bed or for a partition, because I knew that one word about bringing a sister would suffice to get me thrown out at once.
—So I thought. I was so thrilled by the room and the hostel that I threw my hat on the bed to take possession of it and returned to the Manis’ via some dusty footpaths that ran by a few small Jewish neighborhoods, plucking an aromatic leaf now and then from a bush by the roadside and leaping over the rocks in the way...
—Here and there I passed a building—a street—the start of some new neighborhood—a school—a hospital—a hostel—a sanatorium. Outside the old walls, Jerusalem is still a collection of uncollated ideas, of the private whims of individuals who have picked out some hillside and hatched their thoughts upon it. As of yet, however, no two thoughts have coalesced; there are not even any roads to connect them, just the trails beaten by persevering hikers. And thus, thirsty and dehydrated—for I had lost my way once or twice, there being no sounds to navigate by—there being nothing, in fact, but the profound silence of a holiday morning—I arrived back at the house I had left early in the day. It was deserted. The Swedish midwife suggested that I try the Bukharian synagogue, in which, she said, the service would soon be over—and indeed, as I approached it the worshipers came pouring out, among them Dr. Mani, who looked like a positive eminence with his large prayer shawl bag under his arm. He was slowly steering his little blind mother, surrounded by a crowd of people and assisted by Linka while his daughter walked alongside them; his son, dressed in black as usual, was trailing a few steps behind, alone by himself like the catchword at the bottom of a page that is waiting for a hand to turn it so that it can begin the new page.
Mr. Mani Page 30