A Simple Story

by S. Y. Agnon

  “Something tells me you dreamed it,” said Hayyim Yehoshua.

  “Why should I have dreamed it?”

  “Something just tells me you did.”

  “Since when is what something tells you any reason for me to have weird dreams?”

  “They couldn’t be any weirder than the story you just told us.”

  “What’s so weird about it?”

  “If it wasn’t weird,” said Hayyim Yehoshua, “you wouldn’t have bothered to tell it in the first place.”

  “But it’s God’s truth!”

  “It’s God’s truth,” said Hayyim Yehoshua, “that the groom doesn’t look like a groom to me.”

  “And the bride?” asked Mottshi Shaynbart.

  “The same goes for the bride.”

  “I never saw such a thing in my life,” said Leibush Tshortkover. “An only daughter marrying an only son.”

  They were indeed two only children. Their parents had put all they had into them and given them the finest wedding that could be asked for. Had the whole town not known that it was taking place, it would have realized as much from the commotion; even a deaf man passing by might have guessed that a celebration was under way from the sight of Boruch Meir’s closed store, its shutter rolled down as on Sabbaths and holidays and its two locks glinting in the sun. But there was no one passing by, for whoever was not attending one of the other weddings in town was already at Hirshl and Mina’s. Even Boruch Meir’s two shopboys, who could have been asked to mind the store, were invited by him and as cordially received as if they were his own in-laws. In fact, Boruch Meir had invited everyone he knew. Getzel Stein was there in his best, though he was not as gay as he might have been, for he had been hoping to see Blume, and Blume was not to be seen.

  Though Blume knew that it was the day of Hirshl’s wedding, she refused to feel downcast or upset. She spent the day in Akavia Mazal’s house, playing with the baby as usual, or perhaps even more than usual. Not that she was indifferent to Hirshl. Blume loved Hirshl. But as Hirshl had married someone else, it did no good to think about him.

  Hirshl stood wan and tired beneath the wedding canopy. His bride stood beside him. Mina was as pale as a tallow candle, and Hirshl was like her reflection in a mirror.

  (What brought this image to mind? The candles that were lit beneath the wedding canopy in honor of the bride and groom.)

  The white candles with their rims of red flame suggested bitterly crying eyes. Suddenly one went out in a draft. A candle that goes out beneath the wedding canopy is supposed to be a sign of bad luck, but neither Hirshl’s nor Mina’s parents noticed it—while as for Hirshl, his thoughts were elsewhere, though hardly anywhere in particular. His glance wandered from the rabbi to the flask of wine in his assistant’s hand, and from there to the slowly dripping candles that were staining the blue ribbons tied around them. He remembered having once read or heard of a Hindu sect that, when a man and woman were divorced, put them in a room with two candles, one for each of them, where they waited to see what would happen. If the man’s candle went out first he departed at once and never came back, leaving the house and its possessions to the woman, while if his wife’s went out first she did the same.

  Just then Hirshl’s glance shifted and he saw that a candle had gone out. God in heaven knew whose it was. The bridesmaid holding it blushed and relit it from the candle of the bridesmaid next to her. Hirshl looked away and wondered whether the bridesmaids had tied the white candles with blue ribbons because they were Zionists, or whether the colors were a coincidence. I suppose that if they had tied them with red ribbons, he thought, I would wonder if they were socialists. If they didn’t, then they must be Zionists. Still, I would have liked red better.

  The rabbi concluded his blessings, and the best man led the bride and groom to a large room with many chairs squeezed together and many people seated on them. Mina hardly knew any of them and did not raise her head to look at them. The guests dipped into their soup bowls, the spooning of the soup and the smacking of their lips making a single greasy sound. How much soup could there be in one bowl, and how long could it take to get it down? And after the soup and its spoons would come the meat and its forks, and after the meat the dessert. All her life Mina had lived in a cozy little world from which soup slurpers and meat spearers were excluded. The wedding had already exhausted her. God in heaven knew she had to rest. Yet well-bred young lady that she was, she soon rose to circulate among the guests. The fiddles struck up, and everyone merrily finished the meal, after which the rabbi gave the wedding address while Mina sat by Hirshl’s side wondering why such a great to-do was made about love. Not that she had anything against Hirshl. Far from it. But she had been content with her life before he came along too.

  When the grace after meals had been said, it was everyone’s turn to dance with the bride. First the rabbi took a handkerchief, held it by one end, gave the other end to Mina, and did a perfunctory jig. Then the handkerchief passed to Boruch Meir, then to Gedalia, then to the guests of honor, and then to all the other guests, each one circling with Mina as much as his strength and love of dance permitted, while Gildenhorn and Kurtz capered around them, leaping over and dodging under the white cloth, Gildenhorn, who was as tall as a ship’s mast, practically scraping the ceiling, and Kurtz, who was as short as a dwarf, barely higher than the floor. Then all the men danced with the men and all the women with the women until the rabbi went home, when men and women danced together until dawn while the wedding jester made up comic verses, the musicians fiddled away, and Kurtz, Gildenhorn, Mottshi Shaynbart, Leibush Tshortkover, and assorted other guests and gate-crashers played practical jokes.

  A pale, chill light trickled through the windows. One by one the candles went out and the guests rose and departed. At last Mina and Hirshl rose too. The cantor and his choir sang them a parting song, and the Gildenhorns walked them to their new home.

  Chapter seventeen

  Their home had two rooms and a kitchen, in which the servant girl slept. In the larger room were two beds that stood side by side, a chest of drawers with a big wall mirror above it, a round table in the middle of the floor surrounded by six chairs, and two closets, one for Hirshl’s clothes and one for Mina’s. Apart from the chairs, which were fashioned from straw in the style called “Viennese,” everything was made of walnut. The smaller room served no purpose and was set aside for the future when, God willing, there would be children. Indeed, the larger room was not strictly necessary either, for the couple could have lived with the Hurvitzes, as Tsirl had suggested one day while talking to the Ziemlichs. The house and table that had been good enough for Hirshl to grow up in and eat on, she said, were good enough for Mina too. Sophia Gildenhorn, however, who happened to be present and knew that Mina would never want to live with Hirshl’s parents, had remarked, “Two’s company, more’s a crowd.” Tsirl took the hint and rented a small apartment for Hirshl and Mina.

  When the wedding week was over, Hirshl returned to the store. The charmed air of a newlywed still hung over him. He had trouble concentrating on his work and yawned without realizing it in front of the customers, who commented on it with a smile. All day he waited for evening to come, yet when it did he lingered in the store until Tsirl had to chase him out and remind him that Mina was waiting. “Here,” she would tell him, handing him a bag of sweets, “give this to Mina.” Whomever Hirshl told Mina it was from, Tsirl, conventional wisdom notwithstanding, clearly begrudged her new daughter-in-law nothing.

  Though often Mina seemed happy to see him when he came back from the store, sometimes Hirshl could feel her withdraw from him. He knew that women’s hearts were fickle, yet he no more understood what made her glad one time than what made her sulky the next. At such moments he grew moody himself, in response to which she retreated into a mournful silence. If that’s what she wants, he would think, let’s see how long she can stand it. He would begin to put her to the test, or else get up and sit down again with a noisy scraping of his chair, but
Mina’s silence only grew more woeful until the whole room was filled with such anguish that, suddenly alarmed by it, Hirshl would start to talk in spite of himself. At first she would answer him grudgingly; then willingly; then in a tone of relief. By the time he rose from his chair again the two of them would have made up.

  Sometimes he returned from work to find Sophia Gildenhorn, who always vanished the moment he appeared. Occasionally Mina’s mother was there. Bertha lit up when she saw him and he too was friendly toward her, answering her questions, asking more of his own, and talking in lively tones. Not that she had much of interest to say, but her interest in Hirshl drew him out and made him loquacious with her.

  Gedalia was seldom in Szybusz. Getting in the harvest, which was a big one that year, kept him busy all summer, so that it was all he could do to steal a few minutes here and there in which to visit his daughter, ask her and Hirshl how they were, sit with them a short while, say “Godspeed,” and depart. On his way out he made sure to touch the mezuzah on the doorpost and to invoke the Lord’s blessings on his daughter’s home.

  The days came and went. Though no two days in the world are ever alike, no day in Hirshl and Mina’s lives was ever different from any other. Their mood might change a thousand times in the course of it, but its own course stayed the same, with Hirshl waiting on customers in the store and Mina knitting or embroidering at home. Sometimes she put on her going-out clothes and went to visit Sophia, stopping on her way to say hello to her husband. No longer did she arrive at the Hurvitzes’ in a dancing carriage piled high with bags to unload. God in heaven had given her a home of her own, and she did not need theirs anymore. Her only baggage nowadays was her purse and her parasol, which were easily portable and no trouble at all.

  Sophia was generally free during the day and was always glad to see Mina. If it seems odd that the two found so much to talk about, the Rabbis themselves once declared that, out of ten measures of talk that God gave the world, nine were given to women. Certainly Sophia’s conversation appealed to Mina more than Hirshl’s, since whenever Heinrich told her some news, say of some incident in the store, she was never quite sure why he had bothered, which was not at all the case with Sophia. Had Hirshl kept abreast of women’s fashions, he and Mina would have shared a common interest, for Mina owned many elegant clothes and changed them many times a day; yet to Hirshl, unfortunately, all outfits looked alike and one dress was as good as another. Indeed, even had he been more sartorially minded it might not have mattered very much, Mina’s weakness for fine clothes being less a matter of good taste than of having the money to buy them with and a tailor who knew how to make them.

  Hirshl might also have talked to Mina about the books that he read, yet after two or three tries he gave up on this too, for though she had studied various subjects, she had lost all interest in her own education from the moment she left school. Indeed, Hirshl never knew whether to smile or to wince at how what he told her went in one ear and out the other. In the end he learned to keep both his books and his knowledge to himself. Sometimes, it was true, Mina asked him what he was reading, but no sooner did he begin to explain than she started to yawn. If not for the hot blood of youth that they shared, there would have been nothing between them. As it was, intellectual compatibility was not everything.

  Hirshl’s routine was unchanging. He spent his days in the store and his nights with his wife. His mother had raised him to be regular in his habits, and though he sometimes wished that he did not have to spend every evening alone with Mina, this was not a wish that came true. Even Bertha and Sophia had conspired of late to strand him with her, Bertha because she was busy in the village and Sophia because . . . but only God in heaven knew why Sophia behaved as she did. It almost seemed to Hirshl that she visited his home for the sole purpose of disappearing when he arrived, leaving him no choice but to sit up with Mina by himself.

  Hirshl resented being cooped up with Mina all the time. Sometimes he wondered angrily how she could fail to see that it was bad for them—yet when she kept away from him, he felt annoyed by this too. And though Mina also thought it would be better to spend less time together, the power of regularity proved stronger than the power of thought. Were their closeness not only physical, she would not have minded it. Since it was, it made her unhappy too.

  What, wondered Mina, did other people do? Had Sophia encouraged her at all, she would have gladly told her all her problems. But the same Sophia who had egged Mina on so before her marriage now seemed almost meekly unassertive.

  A welcome change came from an unexpected quarter. The month of Elul arrived with its penitential prayers, and though, apart from their first and last night, Hirshl did not rise in the small hours of the morning to go to them, the mood of mild forbearance that descended on the town affected him and Mina too. They might not have put it that way, but it did make them realize that there were more important things in the world than the conversations of husbands and wives.

  The summer and High Holy Days passed, as did the first four of the eight days of Sukkos, the Feast of Tabernacles.

  The sun was banked by clouds that cast their changing colors earthward and formed strange apparitions in the skies. Birds called from the bare fields, and heavy yellow pears hung from their branches, offering up their sweetness to the world. In Malikrowik the peasant girls sat on their doorsteps, braiding heads of garlic and knotting corn and onions before hanging them in the sun to dry. Preparing to set out, the birds measured their shadows each day and took to the air in little, probing flights. Overhead the clouds drifted together, coupled, and went their separate ways again. If no rain fell from them, this was doubtless because the Feast of Tabernacles was not yet over and Jews had not yet begun to pray for precipitation in the Holy Land and elsewhere.

  Gedalia Ziemlich had had a bountiful year. The harvest was a good one, and so were the prices it brought. Poultry and egg prices were up too. Indeed, when the Lord decides to be generous He does not take half measures. Hard though it was to believe, the same chickens that cackled in refuse on Gedalia’s farm were now ceremoniously received at the railway station by a trainman wearing the peaked cap of the Kaiser, who sent them and their eggs off to Germany. Not even in the days of the Mishnah, when a whole tractate called Betsa, which is Hebrew for “egg,” was composed, were eggs ever treated with such honors. And though they had always done well in Szybusz, they were never so profitable as now that Arnold Ziemlich, Gedalia’s cousin from Germany, had a special agent there to buy and ship them.

  Of course, there were those who accused Herr Ziemlich of driving up egg prices, but there were just as many others who praised him for providing a livelihood not only to the chicken growers but also to the carpenters who made the coops and crates, the peasant girls who sorted and wrapped the eggs in straw, and the clerks who filled out the shipping forms. Not that there were no chickens or eggs in Germany—yet you could not compare the taste of a German chicken or egg to one from Galicia. If prior to Herr Ziemlich’s appearance the children of Szybusz had come running at the sight of a single German stamp, there was now not a child in town without his own collection. And even though the price of eggs may have gone up, people went right on eating them. Indeed, whereas there were old folk in Szybusz who still could remember when eggs were so scarce that a single one cost a whole kroner and housewives stopped glazing their Sabbath breads with egg yolk, one now ate as many eggs as one pleased even on ordinary weekdays.

  Hirshl and Mina spent the holiday in Malikrowik and were gladly wined and dined there. Though they were given Mina’s old room, which had not been used since the day of her wedding, its floor sparkled like a mirror and its walls gleamed as though freshly whitewashed, for while Gedalia had been building the holiday sukkah Bertha and the servant girls had been getting ready for their guests, sweeping, mopping, and cleaning out cobwebs. An unlived-in room was not easily made habitable again: although the mezuzah on its doorpost might keep out the evil spirits, there was nothing in the world that co
uld keep out the dust with which Heaven signaled its displeasure that, while some Jews had nowhere to live, others allowed rooms to stand empty.

  Once more Mina’s bed stood freshly made and smelling of cologne. Next to it stood Hirshl’s. Had it not been for the cologne, he could have smelled its new wood. It indeed was one of God’s mysteries how Bendit the carpenter, who had never slept in a bed in his life and spent his nights curled up on the floor, could have made such a fine piece of furniture, out of which only three or four days’ use stood to be gotten. And even then, as comfortable as it was, Hirshl did not sleep in it very much, since each morning of his stay in the village saw him up before the crack of dawn. Day and night might exist in all places but they were not the same everywhere, and Hirshl liked to see the houses, cottages, barns, stables, trees, and bushes of the village waking up beneath their blanket of white mist through which the moon and stars shone with a halo of mutable light and the first villagers stepped outside to care for the farm animals that lowed and bleated happily to see them. Yet it was not a world that he could remain in forever. Soon he turned around and headed back for the Ziemlichs’.

  Mina usually slept till nine o’clock. “Are you up already, Heinrich?” she would ask in surprise when she awoke, opening her eyes and stretching her still-tired arms. Hirshl would answer with a nod so as not to disturb the peaceful silence of the morning before Mina’s old nurse came along with a basin of hot bathwater, a cup of coffee that was more than half cream, and some pastries filled with raisins and cheese. “What day is it today?” Mina would ask, sipping the creamy head of her coffee while cutting herself a piece of pastry. Then her parents arrived to look in on her, Gedalia with fresh willow leaves in his beard, for he had been down to the river before dawn to gather willow sprigs for the holiday palm branch, and Bertha with a bowl of yellow pears.

  “Did you sleep well?” Bertha asked.