by S. Y. Agnon
“Father and his horses know each other,” said Mina.
Gedalia gave her a fond nod.
“That,” said Tsirl, “is when they can see each other. But how can he recognize them by the sound they make when he’s in here and they’re out there? You can’t expect me to believe that, Mina.”
Stach curbed the horses, climbed down from the carriage, and struck his hands together to warm them. Not that it was winter yet, but it was time to get ready for it.
Indeed, winter was soon upon them. The warm, bright sun grew pale and cold, and the merry outings of summer gave way to long, somber hours of sitting at home. Rain and snow followed one another, driven by strong winds. If one was lucky enough to have them, it was a time to be with one’s friends before a roaring fire in a brightly lit home.
Hirshl seemed like another person. He enjoyed having company, and company felt comfortable with him. Even people who did not seem to be his type grew accustomed to dropping in on him and Mina, whether singly or in groups. Even Kurtz, whom Hirshl did not especially like and Mina could not abide, was a frequent visitor. Surely it was not just his habit of pinching off bits of bread and rolling them between his fingers that made Mina dislike Kurtz, who had been, after all, the first to congratulate her on her engagement; since dislike him she did, however, Hirshl felt obliged to go out of his way to be nice to him.
So transformed was Hirshl that he was now even on first-name terms with Sophia Gildenhorn, who called him Heinrich. Sophia was at Mina’s constantly. She liked to be with what she thought of as young people, for though she was only two years Mina’s senior, she seemed to herself, having been married first, much older. Nevertheless, she still always left as soon as Hirshl returned from the store. God in heaven knew why. Perhaps it was to give Hirshl and Mina a chance to be alone together.
Sometimes Mina snuggled close to Hirshl and whispered in his ear. Not that there was anything wrong with what she said, but it did make him feel cornered, and no music is sweet to a cornered man. Do I mind her? he asked himself. No more than I mind anyone. It’s just that she’s always around. It’s like having to wear a coat all the time that never keeps you warm.
Chapter nineteen
God in heaven knew what was the matter with Mina. Her mood was sometimes better and sometimes worse, but better or worse she gave Hirshl no peace. Suddenly, even if he was on his way out, or in the middle of a book, let alone simply standing about, she would interrupt him by saying things like, “Swear to me that you’ll never breathe a word of it and I’ll tell you something that happened to me before we were married.” Hirshl would swear and Mina would tell; yet just as it baffled her how her and her ex-girlfriends’ secrets could leave him so cold, so he failed to grasp what point she saw in such trivia. In the end she would accuse him of not loving her, since if he did he would care about her past.
The mornings were worst. No sooner did Mina awake than she had to tell Hirshl about some dream of hers, which would be forgotten before she ever told it. Just as he was about to leave for the store, however, she would remember it—or rather, not it but them, for she had had, it seemed, a whole slew of dreams, each single one of which, between one yawn and the next, she felt compelled to relate. Not that her dreams were that long; it was more her manner of telling them. If she dreamed of ants, for example, she would insist on describing them ant by ant until Hirshl could feel his skin crawl with them and even detect their odor, which was like that of Mina’s bath lotion. He was sure that, when he rolled up his sleeve in the synagogue to bind his tefillin to his arm, everyone would smell it.
It was hard to say if Mina was getting heavy or wasting away. Though she had never been especially robust, she now looked quite delicately frail. She could no longer stand her favorite foods, yet sometimes she had cravings for dishes she had never tasted in her life, and she had spells of fainting and nausea and suffered from headaches and toothaches. At the same time, although she fought it and corseted herself more tightly than ever to prevent her pregnancy from showing, her stomach was swelling and her limbs were filling out. The plump, good-natured maid now slept by her side, made her hot drinks all the time, gave her frequent little baths, and hovered over her constantly while talking in low tones so as not to excite her, since too much emotion was bad for both mother and child.
Tsirl was exuberant. Only yesterday, it seemed, she had been nursing a child of her own, and here she was soon to be a grandmother. Bertha too could not get over that her baby daughter was about to have a baby, while as for Sophia, she sometimes clapped her hands and said things that Mina had never heard her say before. Sophia too wanted children; yet as long as her husband kept gallivanting about, how could she expect to have them? Once she had imagined she was pregnant and once she actually had been, yet the chicken she was counting on had failed to hatch. Mina, on the other hand, was growing round as a sachet bag from day to day.
Bertha all but moved in with the young couple and lived more in town than in the village. She spent most of her days with Mina and often slept at night in the spare room that had been set aside for the infant that Mina was carrying. If anything, however, this gave Hirshl more breathing room, for now, when Mina awoke in her bed, where she passed much of her time drowsing, she reached out not to him but to Bertha, who came running at once as if her daughter’s yawns were the most eloquent of appeals for assistance. Indeed, when a bundled-up Mina lay sleeping amid her mountains of quilts and pillows in the overheated room that smelled of toilet water, her mother and maid awaiting her beck and call, she resembled a sickly infant herself being treated with potions, vapors, and incense by two witch doctors, who attended her every waking word as if it were a pagan oracle’s.
Mina was far from blind. Though she had never been in love, she knew what love was not. Once, when the two of them were waiting for Sophia to arrive, she said to Hirshl, “I know what’s on your mind. You’re thinking about Sophia.”
“What makes you think I’m thinking about Sophia?” asked Hirshl.
“I just know you are. You wish she were here already.”
“Why should I wish she were here?”
“So as not to have to be alone with me. I bore you.”
“Do you think I’m bored?” asked Hirshl.
“What do you take me for? You wish I were dead.”
“Why should I wish you were dead?”
“You just do.”
“Nobody just wishes his wife were dead.”
“Nobody who loves her,” said Mina.
“And somebody who doesn’t love her does?”
“That’s just what I was waiting to hear from you, dear.”
“What were you waiting to hear?” asked Hirshl.
“That you don’t love me.”
“I don’t?”
“Didn’t you just say that if you loved your wife you wouldn’t wish she were dead?”
“Supposing I did,” said Hirshl. “Does that mean I don’t love you?”
“If you loved me you wouldn’t have said it.”
“What would I have said?”
“If you loved me,” said Mina, “you wouldn’t even have thought it. Or would you say I’m wrong and that you do care for me a tiny bit after all? You’re a smart boy, Heinrich: you know I’m no worse than other women and that you won’t find another wife like me even if I do die. Do you hear me, darling? But I have no intention of dying, not even for your sake, because your next wife won’t make you any happier. Do you think Sophia’s better than I am? Well, she’s not. Oh, she seems likable enough, but if you knew her as I do you’d realize that’s just on the surface. She learned to get on people’s good side helping her father sell lottery tickets, which is lower than I’d ever stoop, because I come from an honest family that’s earned its keep by hard work, not by flattery. Why, when I think of how my father started out as a milkman with a route, I feel proud of him! And my own children won’t go looking for an easy living either but will support themselves like he’s done without bowing
and scraping. Oh, how miserable I am! Come here, Heinrich, give me a kiss. No, not on the forehead, darling, I’m not a dowager queen. On the mouth. Or was that the last kiss you had left? Looking at you, a person might think every kiss cost a fortune.”
Like any well-bred Szybuszian, Hirshl was proud of his family. It may not have been descended from the celebrated Yeshaya HaLevi Horowitz, but it was highly thought of nonetheless, and though until now he had refrained from boasting of it, Mina’s reference to her father made him do so. It was doubtful, however, whether he made much of an impression on her, perhaps because he soon got onto the subject of his mother’s brother, whom his surprised wife had never heard of, so that he said to her:
“If you ask me, my uncle was perfectly sane and just pretending to be crazy, because otherwise his father, that is, my grandfather Shimon Hirsh, whom I’m named after, would have married him off to some woman he didn’t love and made him waste the rest of his life on her, raising a house full of her little darlings, and making lots of money, and getting filthy rich, and being disgustingly respectable. There may be nothing wrong with all that, but I tell you, it would have left him an empty shell of a man. If my uncle had managed to make something of himself on his own, everyone would have said how clever he was. Since he didn’t, everyone thought he was crazy. Nothing ever turns out the way we’d like it to. Our lives aren’t our own, Mina, and others do what they please with them. You can be the same person you always were, and yet suddenly you can do nothing right, even though you’re doing what you’ve always done. The fact is that nobody cares who you really are. One day you’re told to do this and the next day that, and in the end you just do whatever it is and lose all respect for yourself, which everyone else has already done long ago. I’ve thought a lot about this, Mina, and there’s a lot that I could tell you, only it’s already past your bedtime. I will say this, though, and that’s that if I feel empty inside, what does anything else matter? You look so sad, Mina. I swear I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. It makes me sad to think of my uncle too, even though it happened years ago. Well, let me tell you something funny, then. Do you see that fat volume in the bookcase? It’s a Hebrew dictionary. The man who compiled it was married off when he was young to some woman he didn’t even know, as was the custom in those days. Do you know what he did? When he grew a little older and decided to get rid of her, he took the cat one morning and put his tefillin on it. Just imagine it, Mina: his wife and her parents were so frightened that they agreed to a divorce at once. After that he married a woman of his choice and lived with her happily ever after. I don’t know if he still puts on tefillin every day, but I’m sure he leaves the cat alone.”
Hirshl was wrong if he thought this story would cheer Mina up. Unlike Hirshl, Mina had been educated in a boarding school, and before that by Polish tutors in the village, and had no interest in Hebrew dictionaries. One day, in fact, when the dictionary fell by mistake while she was taking down a book from the shelf, she nudged it along the floor with her foot until it vanished beneath the bookcase.
Hirshl was fed up with so many people dropping in. Though for a while after his wedding he had welcomed having guests, he no longer was glad to see them. He had liked entertaining because he had enjoyed having a home of his own to play host in; now that his home had lost its charms for him, so had playing host.
The fact of the matter was that even in his entertaining days Hirshl had been of two minds about it, since Mina and he had never liked the same people. Indeed, he had liked whom he did less for themselves or their good qualities than for their being disliked by Mina, which made liking them seem an obligation. This annoyed Mina, who felt that he was groveling before them, so that she treated them even more coolly. Hirshl, for his part, retaliated by snubbing her friends—apart, that is, from Yitzchok Gildenhorn, whom the two of them made an equal fuss over, Mina seeing to it that his favorite pancakes were prepared by the maid and Hirshl breaking out his best wines and cigarettes for him. Hirshl was cordial to Sophia too. Not that he was all that keen on her; yet he did not want Mina to accuse him of slighting her best friend, who, together with her husband, as he was generous enough to remind them, deserved the credit for his and Mina’s marriage.
And so people stopped coming, until whole weeks passed with hardly a single visitor. It started with Leibush Tshortkover. Since he only talked about eating and drinking, Leibush might have been expected to keep frequenting a house where he could do as much of either as he pleased, yet he was the first to abandon it. Human nature is unpredictable: though Leibush Tshortkover came from the west of Galicia, while Szybusz lay in the east, and from a family of Bobov Hasidim, a sect that was unknown in the town, where he had felt rejected and frightfully lonely at first, so that, when he was taken up by Gildenhorn, in whose house there were always card games, drinks, and lots of fun, he became his fast friend, he had never cottoned to Hirshl. Evidently it was less the drinks that mattered than the conversation between them.
The next to make himself scarce was Mottshi Shaynbart. “Mind you, Hirshl,” he said, “I’d come more often, but the old crutch can’t take the stairs anymore.” Clearly this was a pretext, the truth of the matter being that, since they made one complete human face between them, Leibush’s beard and Mottshi’s mustache were inseparable and always went everywhere together.
Kurtz too was seen less and less. As long as Hirshl and Mina’s house had been full of guests, being one of them had not made him self-conscious. Now that he was the only one left, he felt out of place and vanished.
Kurtz came from a well-to-do home and would have been well-to-do himself had he not left it for the poems of Schiller. German poetry, however, proved a poor provider, so that, if not for the religious studies that he remembered from his childhood, which enabled him to obtain a teaching post in the local Baron de Hirsch School, he would have been left high and dry. As it was, the position was unenviable, for since Kurtz knew as well as anyone that religion was taught only so that the school could not be accused of opposing it, what importance did it really have? Seeing his subject considered a waste of time made him feel like a waste of time too, and seeing him feel that way convinced others that he was. Had he bothered to hold his head higher he might have been more highly regarded, but since he would not have topped five feet even then, it hardly seemed worth the effort.
Apart from their parents and Sophia, no one came to Hirshl and Mina’s anymore. A silent world could be glimpsed through the triangular parting of the curtains. Sometimes Hirshl stood at one window and Mina at another. It was hard to say if they were looking out or in.
“If you wanted them to come, they would,” Mina would reply when Hirshl accused her of driving away their friends. Though he knew she was right, it was easier to blame her than to try winning them back. To make up for the loss, he found himself liking Sophia more than ever, as if she now came only for him. And yet, though it irked him when she too failed to appear, he still sat reading a book when she did.
Sophia was worth having over. She knew what went on in Szybusz as a housewife knows what is cooking in her neighbor’s pot. As long as she gossiped in her normal voice there was nothing very lively about her, but as soon as her voice dropped to a whisper both she and Mina became the very soul of animation.
Hirshl stared over his book at Sophia. Though two years older than Mina, she looked two years younger and resembled a still-growing adolescent. As if her sole motive in talking were pleasing her friend, she went on and on as long as Mina let her. Mina’s lips were parted and there was a veiled look in her eyes; a pink flush tinted her ears and her earrings glittered in the lamplight. It was uncanny how she could listen.
It was uncanny too how Hirshl could be annoyed by what so recently had given him such pleasure. Barely half a year ago, when he sat talking to Mina in Sophia’s house, it had made him glad just to look at her, whereas now the opposite was true. In fact, looking at her was becoming harder and harder. Sometimes her face seemed as white as cotton wo
ol to him; other times still cotton-woolish but crimson; and in either case, such comparisons were not flattering, though whom they flattered less, the husband or the wife, was debatable. Whichever, it was bad for both of them.
Not that Hirshl spent all day with Mina thinking of unpleasant comparisons. Most of the time he was in the store, while each morning he went to pray in the Great Synagogue. He had a great fondness for this high, handsomely decorated building that was vaulted like the heavens inside. He liked its cool stairway that led up to the prayer hall; even more, the hall’s ceiling, which lacked supporting columns and seemed to float on thin air; more yet, its stained windows, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel—and especially its eastern one, which threw a gleaming prism of light on the curtain of the Holy Ark; but most of all, the stone bimah on whose lectern lay an ancient prayer book written on deer vellum that had once long ago, in times of persecution, been handled by men who had martyred themselves in God’s name, and which was still prayed from today with the same punctilious, unchanging adherence to each word and melody of tradition. Though Akavia Mazal had written an entire chapter about this synagogue in his book, Yona Toyber knew even more about its history; yet Hirshl no longer sought out Toyber’s company. He preferred to be alone with his thoughts and was not looking to share them with anyone. Indeed, he had so many of them that only God in heaven knew them all.
Chapter twenty
Hirshl had not seen Blume since she left his parents’ home. Though each day he hoped she would appear in the store, where the Mazals shopped regularly, she never did. Yet while Blume did not come, Hirshl did not stop thinking of her. He pictured her in the breaks between customers and sometimes, when selling them some item, even imagined making her a present of it. Months went by and still he did not despair. If she won’t come by herself, he thought, I’ll have to make her.