Mr. Mani

by A. B. Yehoshua

  —You fell asleep, old man. Look at me ... Papa, Papa, answer me ... don’t scare me ... what is the matter?

  —What is the matter? What did I say? Why are you crying?

  —But I don’t understand. Dearest Papa! You are crying. Why?

  —But for whom?

  —For him? Him? How can you? You ... what are ... oh, Papa...

  —To blame? How? I told you we were just a pretext...

  —How stayed with him? What are you talking about?

  —By myself?

  —Summoned you? From where? To where? You do not know what you are talking about...

  —The master of what?

  —But it was his own self. The demon inside him. You will drive me out of my senses ... stayed with him? I like that, ha ha...

  —What kind of cynicism?

  —Nihilism? No, I have said quite enough ... But what are you crying for? For whom? Can’t you see that Mama is very ill? You are blind ... she is going to die ... if you must cry, cry for those you should cry for...

  Biographical

  Supplement

  Although EFRAYIM SHAPIRO left his parents’ estate as he promised to, it took him a year because of the sudden deterioration in the health of his mother, who died a month after her children’s return from Palestine. It was not until the late autumn of 1900 that Efrayim moved to Cracow, where he took a job as a pediatric physician in a hospital. Linka, who could not bear the loneliness of life on the estate, followed him there and found work as a volunteer nurse in the same hospital. Before long she fell in love with a Catholic doctor and—after a bitter quarrel with her father and brother, who were opposed to the match—became his wife. She converted to Catholicism, moved with her husband to Warsaw, and had a son and a daughter there.

  The dramatic estrangement was exceedingly painful, and soon the family was reconciled. Indeed, since Efrayim Shapiro remained a bachelor, he grew greatly attached to his niece and nephew, whom he visited often in Warsaw and saw during summer vacations on his father’s estate, to which Linka usually came without her husband.

  After the death of Sholom Shapiro in 1918, Linka sold her share of the estate to local farmers, while Efrayim returned to Jelleny-Szad and settled on his half of the land, which was run by a steward. Although his income from it was not as great as his father’s had been, it was still a respectable amount, enough for him to cut down on his medical practice and limit it to occasional house calls in Oświ[ecedil]cim. In effect, he led a leisurely life of early retirement, the happiest moments of which were the visits of his beloved sister and her children—who, despite their having been baptized, took a lively interest in their mother and uncle’s Jewishness.

  With the outbreak of World War II and the German blitzkrieg that overran Poland, Efrayim Shapiro, who was sixty-nine at the time, went to Warsaw to be with his sister. It did not take him long to realize, however, that her home was not a safe hiding place for him and that she, her children, and her grandchildren were in no less danger than he was. Soon he returned to his estate, where—with the help of some loyal servants—he constructed the perfect hideaway and “disappeared.” He remained there from 1939 to 1943, within sight of the nearby concentration camp, whose increasingly technologically advanced features the old doctor had more than an inkling of. When news reached him after the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto that his niece had been sent to Auschwitz, he became so distraught that he gave himself up to the Germans for no good reason, thereby spelling the doom of his servants as well. He never reached the camp itself, however. Collapsing at the entrance to it, he was shot and killed on the spot at the age of seventy-three.

  SHOLOM SHAPIRO did not have an easy time of it after his wife’s death. Having learned to live with the fact of her poor health, he had never dreamed that she would die so quickly. After his son and daughter left Jelleny-Szad, he tried to cope with his loneliness by intensifying his Zionist activity. He did not attend the Fourth Zionist Congress in London because it was held during the year of mourning for his wife, but he was present at the Fifth Congress, which took place in Basel again, and in 1909 he visited Palestine with a group organized by him from the Zionist Club in Cracow. It was a highly successful tour that strengthened the Zionist convictions of its members. While in Jerusalem, Sholom Shapiro went off one day to look for the Manis, but he did not find any of them. Although he was able to locate the clinic in Kerem Avraham, by then converted into a cheap tourists’ hostel, and to identify it by the faded remains of some mirrors in one of its ground-floor rooms, none of the Mani family lived there anymore. Young Yosef Mani, he was told, had departed two years previously to study in Turkey, had stopped on his way in Beirut, and had vanished there. His sister had married a Moroccan Jew and gone with her mother to live with him in Marseilles. The neighbors who told Shapiro all this remembered well the brother and sister from Poland who had been in Jerusalem in 1899 with catastrophic results for their beloved doctor.

  Despite his disappointment at being unable to locate the Manis and offer them financial compensation, Sholom Shapiro was highly satisfied with his trip to Palestine. Although no longer a young man, he formed in the course of it a romantic attachment to a young lady from Cracow, a member of the tour group, which continued after his return to Jelleny-Szad.

  Like Efrayim, Sholom was greatly attached to his “Christian” grandchildren. Since his daughter’s home in Warsaw was not kosher, he did not often visit them there, but each year he waited impatiently for their summer excursion to the countryside, during which he taught them some Hebrew and Judaism. He died after a brief illness in 1918, at the age of seventy, having lived long enough to rejoice at the news of the Balfour Declaration.

  FIFTH CONVERSATION

  An inn in Athens, on the corner of

  Dioskoron and Lapolignoto Streets

  Tuesday afternoon, December 12, 1848

  The Conversation Partners

  AVRAHAM MANI forty-nine years old, born in 1799 in Salonika, then part of Turkey, to his father Yosef Mani.

  Avraham’s grandfather, Eliyahu Mani, was a supplier of fodder to the horses of the Turkish Janissaries and followed behind the Turkish army with five large wagons that housed his large family, which included two wives and two young rabbis who tutored his sons. A shrewd merchant, he sensed immediately upon hearing of the outbreak of the French Revolution that Europe was in for a period of upheavals in which his services as a cavalry supplier would be in great demand. With this in mind, he began to move his activities westward. In 1793, as news reached him of the execution of Louis XVI, Eliyahu Mani crossed the Bosporus and proceeded as far as Salonika, where he found a flourishing Jewish community. And indeed, his gamble paid off and the political and military instability of the times proved a boon for his business. He was able to marry off his children to wealthy and prominent families, and these ties in turn enabled him to expand his affairs even more.

  Eliyahu Mani dearly loved his eldest grandson Avraham, who was born at the very end of the eighteenth century. He did not, however, have many years of pleasure from the boy, because soon after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, he himself passed away. His concern was taken over by his son Yosef, who was born in 1776 in the Persian town of Ushniyya near Lake Shahi, then part of the Ottoman Empire too. Despite the many reversals suffered by the empire during the first decade of the nineteenth century, Yosef ran the business enterprisingly and did especially well during Napoleon’s campaigns in Eastern Europe. At the same time, he did not neglect his children’s education and sent his eldest son Avraham to study in Constantinople with one of the most profound and original rabbinical minds of the times, Shabbetai Hananiah Haddaya. Avraham Mani developed a great liking for this rabbi, who was wifeless and childless despite his over fifty years. Rabbi Haddaya, for his part, was fond of Avraham and decided to sponsor him for rabbinical ordination even though he was not a particularly keen student.

  In 1815, however, Yosef Mani’s business suddenly collapsed in the wake of both th
e Congress of Vienna peace agreements and the first signs of Greek war of independence against the Turks, which endangered transport and commercial shipments. In 1819 his son Avraham was summoned back to Salonika to help his father, who had lost everything and was reduced to eking out a living from a small spice shop in the port. Before long the brokenhearted man died, leaving the shop in Avraham’s possession.

  His forced separation from his rabbi weighed on Avraham greatly. Even though the war with the Greeks made travel perilous, whenever he was able to free himself of his business obligations he would take a week or two off and cross the Bosporus to visit Rabbi Haddaya. Although Avraham never received his ordination, the rabbi presented him with a certificate authorizing him to serve on a nonpaying basis as the spiritual leader of a small synagogue in the port that was frequented mainly by Jewish stevedores and sailors.

  Despite his mother’s urging him to marry, Avraham did not take a wife until 1825, when he wed the daughter of a petty merchant named Alfasi. The couple had a son and daughter: Yosef, born in 1826, and Tamar, born in 1829. In 1832 Avraham Mani’s wife died of an unknown illness that was apparently transmitted by a sailor whom the Manis had put up in their home.

  As Avraham’s business began to prosper, he was able to travel to Constantinople more often. However, he did not always find his old teacher there, because Rabbi Haddaya, who had traveled widely as a young man, was again smitten by wanderlust and was often away on some journey. Generally, his trips took him south and east, and he once even spent a few months in Jerusalem. There he met a woman who several months later came to Salonika and became, to everyone’s surprise, the wife of his old age.

  After his son Yosefs bar-mitzvah, which took place in 1839, Avraham, who was still a widower with two children, decided to bring the boy to Rabbi Haddaya’s school in Constantinople just as his father had brought him. In doing so, he wished both to obtain vicariously the ordination denied to himself and to strengthen his ties with his old rabbi, for whom his admiration had only grown with the years. Before setting out with Yosef, he even taught himself a few words of French, the mother tongue of the rabbi’s wife, in order to help create a bond with her.

  Rabbi Haddaya’s wife, Flora Molkho, took a great liking to Yosef, a vivacious and imaginative youngster who was more intellectually gifted than his father. Having no children of her own, she treated him as her own son and made him her closest companion, since her husband was often away on his travels to the various Jewish communities that invited him to arbitrate legal disputes too knotty for others to unravel.

  And so, even though young Yosef did not study with Rabbi Haddaya himself but rather in a school where his education was so laxly supervised that he spent much of the time roaming the streets of Constantinople, all were in favor of his remaining at the rabbi’s house: his father because of the connection this gave him with his revered teacher; the rabbi’s wife because the boy helped occupy her solitude; and the rabbi himself because he regarded the youth highly, even if the reason for this was none too clear to him.

  Early in 1844 the news reached Dona Flora that her younger sister’s daughter, Tamara Valero, whom she had not seen since Tamara was little, was planning to travel to Beirut with her stepmother Veducha in order to attend the wedding of Veducha’s brother, Tamara’s step-uncle Meir Halfon. Dona Flora asked and received her husband’s permission to travel to Beirut and meet her niece there—and since he himself was unable to accompany her, it was decided that Yosef Mani, who was by now already a young man, should go with her. Avraham Mani raised no objections, and Yosef and Doña Flora sailed to Beirut. They remained there longer than expected and returned with the announcement that—subject of course to the consent of the two fathers and Rabbi Haddaya—Yosef and Tamara were betrothed.

  And indeed, when Tamara returned to Jerusalem, her father gave his approval. But although it was agreed that she would come to Constantinople for the wedding, which was to be presided over by her renowned uncle, the revered Rabbi Haddaya, she failed to arrive—and in the end, unable to restrain himself, Yosef set out by himself for Jerusalem in the winter of 1846 with the intention of bringing his bride back with him. Instead, however, as the families in Constantinople and Salonika later found out, the two were married in a modest ceremony in Jerusalem, where Yosef Mani found work in the British consulate that had opened there in 1838.

  Avraham Mani and Flora Haddaya were both greatly disappointed, since they had looked forward to a grand wedding in the rabbi’s home in Constantinople and to the young couple’s being close to them. Apparently, however, young Mani felt sufficiently drawn to Jerusalem to wish to remain there. In any event, since the mails between Jerusalem and Constantinople were highly irregular and a long while went by without any word from the newlyweds, Avraham Mani decided to travel to Jerusalem in the hope of persuading them to settle in Salonika, or at least, in Constantinople.

  Avraham entrusted his shop to his son-in-law, took with him several bags of his favorite rare spices in the hope of finding a market for them in Jerusalem, and sailed for Palestine, arriving there in the late summer of 1847. Although he had expected to be back within a few months, he remained there for over a year, during which nearly all contact with him was lost. Meanwhile, a mysterious rumor that reached Constantinople in December 1847 told of Yosef Mani’s being killed in a brawl. And indeed, in February 1848, a rabbi from Jerusalem who arrived in Constantinople on a fund-raising mission confirmed this story, to which he added that Avraham Mani had remained in Jerusalem with his son’s wife Tamara in order to be present at the birth of the child she was expecting.

  Throughout the first half of 1848, the elderly Rabbi Haddaya and his wife Flora were greatly upset at being out of touch with Jerusalem, especially since they did, not even know when the birth was supposed to take place. The infrequent greetings or bits of news that arrived from Avraham Mani were vaguely worded and confused. And then, unexpectedly, on the first night of Hanukkah, Avraham Mani arrived at the inn in Athens where Rabbi Haddaya had been lying ill for several weeks.

  FLORA MOLKHO-HADDAYA was born in Jerusalem in 1800 to her father Ya’akov Molkho, who had moved there several years previously from Egypt. In 1819 her younger and only sister married a man named Refa’el Valero, and soon after a son was born to them. Flora Molkho herself, however, remained unmarried, for there was a dearth of eligible young men in Jerusalem and her attachment to her sister and her little nephew made her spurn all suggestions to travel to her father’s family in Egypt, or to her mother’s family in Salonika, in the hope of finding a match. When Rabbi Shabbetai Haddaya visited Jerusalem in 1827, he stayed with the Valeros and met Flora Molkho, whose refusal to leave the city in search of a husband intrigued him. Indeed, Flora’s adamance wa§ now greater than ever, because her sister, having gone through two difficult miscarriages after the birth of her son, was well into another pregnancy.

  Soon, however, all this changed, because shortly after Rabbi Haddaya’s departure a devastating cholera epidemic broke out in Jerusalem that took the life of Flora’s beloved nephew. Her sister, who meanwhile had given birth to a daughter, sank into a depression that led to her death in 1829. Flora Molkho, fearing that her widowed brother-in-law Refa’el Valero would feel obligated to propose marriage to her, hastened to leave Jerusalem for her mother’s family in Salonika. Rabbi Haddaya followed her arrival there with interest and even sought, in 1833, to arrange a match between her and his protégé Avraham Mani, whose wife had recently died. Avraham Mani was keen on the idea, but Flora, although already a woman of thirty-three, refused. Her unmarried state troubled Rabbi Haddaya so greatly that he tried proposing other husbands for her, every one of whom she turned down, until he offered in his despair to marry her himself. Despite being forty years younger than he was, she did not reject his offer. The two were wed within a year and in 1835 Flora Molkho took up residence in Constantinople.

  Although the rabbi and his wife had no children and he was away on his travels for weeks on end, t
he two appeared to get along well. As for Avraham Mani, he quickly recovered from his hurt at being spurned by Flora in favor of his elderly teacher, resumed his ties with the rabbi more intensely than ever, and in 1838 brought him his son Yosef to be his pupil. The rabbi’s wife received the youngster with open arms and—quite taken by his charms, his keen intelligence, and his many interests—chose to have him keep her company. Whenever Rabbi Haddaya went away, he asked his wife to take young Yosef into their home because the latter was an independent and adventurous boy who took advantage of the rabbi’s absence to enjoy the freedom of the city and needed to have an eye kept on him. And indeed, Flora Molkho Haddaya watched Yosef closely. He helped her around the house and sometimes, when the rabbi was gone, even slept beside her in his bed.

  In 1844 Doña Flora was informed that her niece Tamara was planning to travel to Beirut with her stepmother Veducha for a family wedding. At once she had the inspiration of arranging a match between Tamara and Yosef in order to formally link her young favorite with her family. She received permission for Yosef to escort her to Beirut from both the rabbi and Avraham Mani, who was thrilled by the prospect of a marriage bond with his revered master. Although Tamara, for some reason, seemed doubtful about the match, the firm inducements of Doña Flora, coupled with Avraham Mani’s encouragements from afar, resulted in a hasty betrothal in 1845. Tamara returned to Jerusalem to prepare for the wedding, which was to be held in Constantinople. She did not, however, set out, and the rather vague letters that arrived from Jerusalem implied that the groom was expected to come there first in order to meet the bride’s family and make the acquaintance of her native city. Finally, in 1846, Yosef Mani complied, and eventually word reached Constantinople that he and Tamara had been married in Jerusalem and that he was working for the British consul there.