A Simple Story

by S. Y. Agnon

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Hirshl left the study house feeling as light as a feather. He could have reached the forest with three steps, yet he made himself walk slowly, for a man in full possession of himself, he thought, should do nothing that might appear unseemly.

  He made his way with a modest air of deliberation, clutching the velvet bag that contained his prayer shawl and tefillin. Anyone happening to see him just then would have thought he had much on his mind; yet no one saw him at all, and anyone seeing him would have been wrong. Soon he reached the cattle market, where he paused to rest for a while before cutting through the vegetable gardens behind it. Then, after resting once more, he entered the forest.

  The forest was perfectly still. Not a leaf stirred. The ground gave off a mixture of good smells. Holding his bag in his left hand, Hirshl tipped his hat with his right as if passing before a reviewing stand, though there was no one there but him and the trees. Let them think you’re saluting, he told himself, and there won’t be any trouble. What a fool you were, Hirshl, not to have thought of that in front of Blume’s house. There’s nothing like tipping your hat for staying out of trouble—unless it’s taking off your shoes so that Mina won’t hear you when you come home late at night. I had better take them off right now.

  As he was about to remove his second shoe, though, he stood up anxiously and thought, Why, I said I couldn’t feel my own body, but now I see that I can. Or is it just something I imagined, as I did that the trees were officers of the Kaiser when they’re really nothing but trees? Because even if the Bible says that a man is a tree of the field, that’s not at all what it means. A man can’t grow on a tree. He can hang himself from one, though. Would he hear the rooster crow if he did? Oh no oh no, he would hear the frogs croak in the river. Suddenly Hirshl struck his head and cried aloud, “I am not crazy, I am not!”

  He looked about and thought, You said I was crazy because I cock-a-doodle-do, but now you can see that I cock-a-doodle-don’t think that I’m gaga that I’m ga ga ga ga ga a crazy man crows like a rooster but I go ga ga ga ga.

  Father in heaven, wondered Hirshl, glancing up at the sky, what time can it be? He took out his stopped watch and studied it, then lay down in the grass with it hanging out of his pocket, one shoe off and one shoe on, happily laughing and ga-ga-ing to himself. He could not remember ever having felt so at peace. Oh nice oh nice, he thought, staring joyfully up at the sky with a hallucinatory smile on his lips. All at once he leaped up in dismay and exclaimed, “Half past seven!”

  In an instant his smile vanished and a turbid froth appeared in its place. He spat it into the air and it fell back into his eyes. Again he spat it upward and again it rained down on him. Then he turned and ran, the hat toppling from his head. The sun beat down on him. The veins stood out hotly in his brow. He drummed on them with his fists, then removed his other shoe, placed it on top of his head, and began to hop on one foot until a stone sent him sprawling.

  As bizarrely as he was acting, Hirshl had his wits about him. He knew that, unlike his mother’s grandfather who wore a chamberpot on his head, he could not make a hat of a shoe, and that, unlike his maternal uncle who ran off to the forest for good, he would have to go home in the end. Why didn’t he, then? Because he had lost his hat, and one did not go hatless in the hot sun.

  “I wonder what’s kept Hirshl from the store today,” said Tsirl when eleven o’clock had come and gone. She went to his apartment to investigate and found her daughter-in-law in bed with a hot compress on her head and Bertha standing by her side.

  “Where is Hirshl?” Tsirl asked.

  The two of them turned white with consternation.

  Tsirl was equally alarmed. “We had better go look for him,” she said.

  “Please do,” said Mina tremulously. “Oh, please do.” Tsirl gave her an approving look. “He’s probably in the store by now,” said Bertha, adjusting the compress. Yet one look at Mina was enough to know that Hirshl was probably not.

  Mina was beside herself with worry. Coming on the heels of her talk with him that morning, Hirshl’s disappearance left her stunned. Though several times she tried telling Tsirl what had happened, she was too distressed to talk.

  Another hour went by with no sign of Hirshl. By now they had searched the whole town for him. At first they did not advertise his absence. Yet before another hour had passed, all Szybusz knew of it.

  Though various sightings of Hirshl were reported from different places and times of the day, no one knew where he was now. Even those who had seen him disagreed among themselves, some saying that he had been behaving strangely and some that he had not. The same held true of the men who had prayed with him in the study house: half claimed to have known at a glance that something was wrong, while the other half insisted nothing was.

  Boruch Meir questioned everyone composedly, yet he was pale and his beard was disheveled. Though nothing of the sort had been said aloud, something told him what it did not yet tell Tsirl, namely, that the matter was far from simple.

  At sundown Hirshl was found in a field with one shoe on one foot and the other on his forehead, an expression of great anguish in his eyes. It was hard to look at him, though he himself stared straight back at his finders without saying a word. At last he cried out to them, “Don’t cut my throat! I’m not a rooster! I’m not!”

  “What are you talking about, Mr. Hurvitz?” they asked.

  “I won’t say a word,” said Hirshl. “Not one. Do you know Blume Nacht? Of an evening in the marsh grass I’ll sit like a froggy and go ga ga ga.”

  They brought him home and sat him down there. He looked about and could not understand why everyone seemed so sad. When Mina approached him he smiled at her, yet he burst into tears when she reached out to stroke his hair with her cold hand. At last he pulled his head away and said, “Blume, I didn’t go cockle, I just went ga ga ga.”

  Mina fainted dead away and was put to bed at once. Hirshl raised his hand in a military salute and said, “Ga ga ga.”

  “He should be taken to Olesk,” remarked someone.

  This gave the family a new fright. Though no one had dared mention the word, the holy tzaddik of Olesk was known for his cures of crazy people. Gedalia alone took it calmly. All his life he had been waiting for disaster to strike, and now that it had he was not at all surprised.

  Szybusz was agog with the news all night and by morning had settled down again. If someone asked someone else the next day, “Did you hear that Hirshl Hurvitz has gone crazy?” the answer was sure to be, “If anyone has gone crazy, it’s you and your great-grandmother. What did you want him to do, cut off a finger? Or perhaps you would rather he put out an eye?”

  What possessed Hirshl’s townsmen to talk like this about him was simply the fact that he was soon to be examined by the draft board, which was the strictest ever, and that he was perfectly fit. Hirshl, it was the considered opinion in Szybusz, was feigning madness to get out of the army.

  A year or two previously there would have been no need to worry: when the draft board arrived one simply went to the right person, who fixed things with the members of the board, who gave one a medical exemption, the Kaiser having no use for an army of invalids. True, it could not be stated with any accuracy that all of Szybusz avoided service in this way. On the contrary, there were genuine invalids who were drafted, though they too were soon sent home, the Kaiser having no use for them either. God in heaven knew what had changed, but this year’s board no longer took bribes. And while at first it was thought in Szybusz that this was just a rumor started by the fixers in order to jack up their prices, reports were not long in arriving from other towns of people being shot for bribery.

  A doctor was brought to see Hirshl. To test him he asked how old the Kaiser was.

  “Half past seven,” Hirshl replied.

  “And what is your name?” asked the doctor.

  “Half past seven,” said Hirshl.

  The doctor thought the patient might not know an
y German and asked him again in Yiddish. “Half past seven,” Hirshl said. It was his answer to every single question.

  The doctor checked Hirshl’s eyes, took his pulse, wrote out a prescription, and declared, “If this doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

  The second and third prescriptions made Hirshl no saner than the first. Nor did the medicines given by any of the other physicians who were consulted yield better results. In the end it was decided to take him to a specialist in Lemberg.

  And so two days after the onset of Hirshl’s illness his parents set out with him for Lemberg, taking along a paid companion to watch over him.

  The companion proved unnecessary. Hirshl bothered no one and neither croaked nor crowed. He simply sat and said nothing the whole trip. God in heaven knew what he was thinking. Though his parents pointed out to him each station they pulled into, he didn’t even trouble to look up. From time to time Tsirl offered him food from a basket. If his hand was closed, he did not open it to take it; if it was open, he did not close it to grasp it; and when she tried sticking it into his mouth, he simply refused to chew.

  As they entered Stanislaw, Tsirl redoubled her efforts. “Look, Hirshl, look, we’re in Stanislaw,” she said, hoping to get a response to the name of the town in which Mina had studied. Hirshl, however, showed no more interest in Stanislaw than he had in any other place he had passed through.

  Tsirl felt despondent. And thinking of the store just made it worse. Since the day she stopped nursing Hirshl she had hardly missed an hour’s work in it, and, on the rare occasions when she had, she had left it in the hands of her husband and son. Now all three of them were away. It was not that she was worried about pilfering. Getzel was as good as gold and would keep an eye on Feyvel. Still, a store should not be left without an owner, to say nothing of a house. Had Blume still been the Hurvitzes’ maid, Tsirl would not have been concerned. But how could she not be with Blume’s replacement? Indeed, Tsirl thought of a great many people on the way to Lemberg, of whom Mina did not happen to be one.

  At a station not far from Lemberg, Getzel Stein’s father boarded the train. He was coming from seeing the Rabbi of Belz, whose intercession he had sought with the chicken eaters of Szybusz, and his beard was unkempt and his shirt open at the collar in the manner of the Belz Hasidim. Not that the Rabbi of Belz had the least influence in Szybusz, where most Jews were not Hasidim at all and the few who were owed their allegiance to the courts of Tshortkov, Husatyn, Sadigora, Vishnitz, and Utynja. Yet as the rabbis of these places had turned Getzel Stein’s father down flat, he had gone in the end to Belz. He was telling the Hurvitzes of his adventures there when into their car walked Sebastian Montag.

  Sebastian Montag was on his way to see what could be done about replacing the draft board that was about to visit Szybusz with another, more amenable one. Though he had been traveling first-class, a sudden craving for a Jewish conversation had made him leave the first-class carriage to explore the rest of the train. “Your Polish gentleman,” he explained, “is fine to drink and gamble with, but talking to him is a waste of breath. In the time that it takes him to understand what you’ve said a Jew can say his prayers twice. The only difference is that, when a Jew prays, God sometimes answers to the point, which is more than can be said of your Pole.”

  Sebastian Montag was sorry to hear about Hirshl. He patted him on the head, bent down to kiss him, and recited two verses from Psalms, one against illness and one against possession by spirits, before going back to the first-class carriage for a gentlemanly game of cards.

  Chapter twenty-eight

  They arrived in Lemberg and went straight to Dr. Langsam, an elderly neurologist who had treated many of the mental patients in Galicia. It was said of him that he had studied in his youth to be a rabbi, but that, hearing a Jewish patient once abused by a Polish doctor, a not uncommon occurrence in those days when Gentile physicians treated Jews’ bodies while damning their souls, he had resolved to go to medical school instead. Before long he acquired a reputation as a first-rate practitioner whom people came to see from all over, while eventually he stopped treating physical complaints in order to specialize in nervous ones, which could lead to hopeless dementia if not dealt with in time. Never one to give up on a case, he had nursed many of his patients back to health.

  Unlike the doctors before him, Dr. Langsam did not seek to test Hirshl with puzzles or by asking him how old the Kaiser was. He simply said hello and inquired, as if unable to understand what such a healthy-looking young man was doing in his sanatorium, “Well now, what seems to be the matter with you?”

  After he had examined Hirshl he gave him a bed, had food and drink brought to him, and attended to all his needs as if he were a guest needing to recuperate from a long, tiring journey.

  Dr. Langsam did not put many questions to Tsirl or Boruch Meir either. It was immaterial to him whether or not they told him the whole truth about Hirshl, since neither the patient’s history nor his previous course of treatment struck him as particularly important. What was crucial, he explained to Hirshl’s parents, was to keep their son out of the lunatic asylum and away from Szybusz—out of the asylum because it could make even a sane man crazy, and away from Szybusz because he would never get well if the children there called him names and threw stones at him. The combination of meekness, resignation, and sadness that he saw in Hirshl’s face made the old doctor take an instant liking to him.

  Dr. Langsam made no effort to sound either hopeful or discouraging. “I have never kept anyone here who was not sick,” he told Boruch Meir and Tsirl, “nor turned anyone out who was. When your son is ready to return home, I’ll write to inform you.” He told them what the treatment cost, asked for three months’ payment in advance, and promised to give Hirshl kosher food.

  Dr. Langsam was sparing in his use of drugs. He had long forgotten most of the old ones that he learned about in medical school and did not bother keeping up with the new ones. Since some medication was expected of him, however, he sometimes mixed five drops of a ten percent tincture of opium into a liquid and gave it to his patients to drink. This solution, which he had come across in an old medical journal and grudgingly prescribed for the sole purpose of distinguishing his method of treatment from that of the tzaddik of Olesk, was administered to Hirshl twice a day in a small glass containing equal parts of water and brandy. The dosage was decreased after the second week, and the only other medicine received by Hirshl was a laxative every Monday and Thursday, the opium having a constipating effect.

  Hirshl took these preparations uncomplainingly. He no more objected to the bitter taste of the opium than he did to the nauseatingly sweet laxative, whose yellow emulsion looked like insecticide. Now and then Dr. Langsam substituted castor oil, or gave him all three remedies together.

  Boruch Meir and Tsirl returned disconsolately to Szybusz. As long as they were occupied with Hirshl, there had been no time to feel their disgrace; now that they were homeward bound without him, the full extent of it began to dawn on them. They sat alone in their compartment, Boruch Meir in one corner and Tsirl in another, heaving a sigh now and then. For years they had waited for their son to be born, and now they had raised him and married him off for calamity to single him out. The ancient rabbinical curse on Tsirl’s great-great-grandfather had not yet run its course. Perhaps it might have had Hirshl remained in the study house and become a rabbi himself.

  In Stanislaw they changed from the express to the local. The journey to Szybusz was a slow one. The train stopped at every station, and passengers got on and off. Some were Boruch Meir’s fellow townsmen, who knew more about his own life than he did. Though he pulled his coat up and his hat down so as not to be recognized, they noticed him at once and shouted hello at the top of their voices. Not that his downfall made them happy. Far from it. Their happiness came rather from having been away from Szybusz, for a few days’ absence from home did wonders for a man.

  Boruch Meir and Tsirl crept abjectly into town. Every str
eet and streetcorner bespoke their ignominy. Here Hirshl had been led home from the forest. Here he had crowed like a rooster. Here he had quacked like a duck. Here he had croaked like a frog.

  A short while later Bertha arrived.

  “You certainly gave us a good scare,” she exclaimed. “Why, Mina is in her eighth month. Did you ever think what all this excitement could have done to her and the baby, God forbid?”

  Tsirl stared at her and said, “I swear to you, Bertha, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Well, I do,” said Bertha. “I just don’t know why you kept it from us.”

  “Kept what from you?”

  “About Hirshl.”

  “We didn’t tell you about Hirshl? Do you mean to say that you don’t know where he is?”

  “Of course I know,” said Bertha.

  “Then what did we keep from you?”

  “Don’t you think we should have been told?”

  “We didn’t tell you that we were going to Lemberg?”