by S. Y. Agnon
“Of course you did, you just didn’t say why.”
“Oh my God, Bertha. I thought all Szybusz knew why.”
“Tsirl,” said Boruch Meir, “let me talk to Bertha.”
“I wish you would, Boruch Meir,” said Bertha. “I’d like an explanation.”
“An explanation of what, Bertha?” Tsirl asked.
“How can you have pulled such a trick on a young girl like that? It’s not as if she were something that the cat had brought home, God forbid.”
“What kind of a trick?” asked Boruch Meir.
“Do you think I don’t know the whole thing was staged?”
“What was?” Tsirl asked.
“Why, Hirshl’s madness.”
“Staged?” asked Boruch Meir and Tsirl in one breath.
“Oh, come now,” said Bertha. “Don’t you think I know that it was all just a stunt to get out of the army?”
“A stunt to get out of the army?” repeated Boruch Meir.
“The whole world knew except me. We were half dead with worry until they came along and told us.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” asked Tsirl.
“Why, everyone and his uncle. Yona Toyber and Sophia Gildenhorn and that short little what’s-his-name fellow.”
“Kurtz,” said Boruch Meir. “She means Kurtz.”
“Right,” Bertha said. “Kurtz, that’s his name. The little dwarf who danced at the wedding. Even he knew Hirshl did it to keep from being drafted.”
Boruch Meir stared at Bertha flabbergasted. Tsirl leaned toward her and whispered, “Mum’s the word, mother of the bride. Does Mina already know about it?”
“I’d hate to think of what might have happened to her if she didn’t.”
God certainly works in mysterious ways, Tsirl thought. Boruch Meir said aloud, “Don’t be upset with us, Bertha. The whole thing called for the utmost discretion.”
“Bertha doesn’t have to be told,” said Tsirl. “She knows perfectly well that the less said about it, the better. Now let’s go see Mina and bring her regards from Hirshl.”
On their way they met Yona Toyber. Yona, who was the first to see Hirshl on the morning of the day he was found in the field, had perceived right away that he was not fully in his senses.
“Well, Mr. Toyber,” said Bertha, “what do you think of the latest developments?”
Yona Toyber let out a sigh and said, “Not everyone has the good fortune to live in a country with no draft.”
When he was gone Boruch Meir remarked, “What a clever fellow that one is. Nothing he says seems to make sense, but when you look at it more closely, it’s as if he’s read your thoughts. Has anyone heard news of his wife? They tell me she’s terribly ill.”
Chapter twenty-nine
After three days of sleeping off his fatigue in bed, Hirshl no longer replied “half past seven” to every question. On the contrary, he gave long-winded answers to whatever he was asked, forgot the names of things and had to describe them in a roundabout fashion, and often lost track of what he was saying and was forced to start again from the beginning.
Although it was commonly assumed in the profession that a neurologist who had not known a patient when he was well could only diagnose his ailment by a battery of tests, this assumption was not shared by Dr. Langsam. In fact, he never bothered testing Hirshl at all. He simply talked with him to stimulate his mind.
No matter how well-off a man is in a big city and how dirt-poor he grew up in his native town, he will always remember the latter with nostalgia. Although forty years had passed since Dr. Langsam had left his birthplace, he still talked about it all the time, and while the town itself had changed greatly in those years, one would never have known it from his descriptions. Every day he came into Hirshl’s room and sat down by his bed to chat with him, and each of these conversations began and ended with Dr. Langsam’s hometown. Sometimes he reminisced about its market street, whose shops, flanked by tiny houses hardly larger than chicken coops, stood empty all week long. If a shopkeeper had a bit of education he would study a page of the Mishnah, while if he did not he would sit reciting Psalms—until, that is, Thursday arrived, when the whole town came to life, the peasants poured in from the outlying villages to do their buying and selling, and the local merchants circulated frantically among them trying to earn a few pennies for the Sabbath. And sometimes Dr. Langsam told Hirshl about his study house, which had glowed with the light of learning even though its walls were falling down and its ceiling was as black as tar.
What did his fellow Jews eat and drink in those days, and when did they find time to rest? “If someone were to tell me that human beings cannot survive like that,” said Langsam, “as a doctor I would have to agree. But the fact is that they survived for generations and didn’t even know what they were missing—except, I must say, for our local rabbi, who longed all his life to buy a copy of Mahatsit HaShekel, Rabbi Shmuel HaLevi of Kolin’s rabbinic commentary, and never had enough money. He had all week to study without interruption, because litigation was seldom brought to him in such a small place; and since there was nothing to eat but bread and onions, even questions about the dietary laws rarely arose. The one exception was Thursdays again, when a Jew who slaughtered a calf or a chicken for the Sabbath might bring him a perforated lung or a malformed crop for his opinion. Then he would place his handkerchief in his Talmud for a bookmark, take out a little penknife, and begin poking about at that crop’s membrane like a doctor performing an autopsy. Why, no surgical instrument I have ever seen since seemed to me the equal of that dull knife with which he kept scraping away in the hope of being able to pronounce some poor Jew’s meat kosher! The only other implement that he owned was a goose quill for writing his scholarly annotations. He made his own ink from candle smoke, and sometimes, when his quill was broken and he couldn’t get hold of another, since geese were not slaughtered every day, he simply made a mark with his fingernails to remind himself to write his thoughts later. “But God,” concluded Dr. Langsam, “did give us Jews two good gifts, the Torah and the Sabbath. I don’t know what we would have done without them.”
Had anyone asked Hirshl how Dr. Langsam was treating him, he might have replied in surprise: What? Is he a doctor? Still, he could feel that he was being healed. The firm hand that casually shook his own each time the doctor came and went was not soft like Yona Toyber’s, nor did it make him want to kiss it. Often, when Dr. Langsam sat chatting with him as one chats with a friend, Hirshl would wonder, Does he really know that I crowed like a rooster and sang that it was snowing on the green, green grass? That’s hard to believe, because he would have locked me up in a cage and doused me with cold water if he did. Indeed, although Dr. Langsam spoke with Hirshl about many things, he never mentioned his illness; just as Hirshl, though he spoke of many things to Dr. Langsam, never mentioned Blume Nacht.
He had in fact stopped thinking of her. Yet while he no longer invoked her image, it still sometimes hovered before him—and when it did, and he felt her mute blue glance upon him, the smile that played faintly over his lips was very much like her own. There was nothing really surprising about Hirshl seeing in Lemberg what Blume was doing in Szybusz, for he had grown up with her in one house and was familiar with her every movement; as implausible as such clairvoyance might seem, it was true.
One day Dr. Langsam came to see Hirshl. He shook his hand, asked how he was feeling, and, without waiting for an answer, sat down on the edge of his bed and began to chat as usual while taking his pulse. Upon leaving he asked Hirshl if he would like to go out to the garden.
Before long Schrenzel, the fatherly orderly, came by, helped Hirshl to get dressed, and took him to the garden, where he sat him down in a chair while standing a short distance away. After a while he returned him to his room, helped him to undress again, and put him back into bed. From then on Hirshl was taken outside for an hour or two, or sometimes even three, every day.
The sanatorium’s attractive garden was planted with trees,
bushes, and flowerbeds, and had chairs and benches for the patients. Often when Hirshl was sitting there he saw an old man scratching at the ground and talking to himself. This was Pinchas Hartleben, who had owned a house and property in Borislaw, where one night he had seen the earth open up and swallow his wife and children. Not knowing that this land, which seemed accursed like Sodom and Gomorrah, was in fact floating on underground deposits of oil, he went and sold it for a song to a man who was soon a millionaire, while he himself was left practically indigent. Eventually he took to wandering from place to place, scrabbling for oil in the dirt with his fingers, and talking to his dead wife and sons. “Just wait,” he would tell them. “Soon I’ll discover a whole bunch of oil wells and you and I will be rolling in gold.” He was already an old man when some people who had pity on him sent him to Dr. Langsam.
Another patient of the doctor’s, who came from a long line of Hasidic holy men, was named Rabbi Zanvil. His father and brothers were well-known rabbis, and he too had attracted a camp of followers; yet being by nature an unworldly recluse, he had refused all their honors, stopped eating and drinking, and begun speaking of himself as though he were already dead and no longer living in this world. Indeed, anyone coming to ask him for his blessing was accused by him of practicing necromancy. This, however, only attracted more disciples, who were convinced that such abnegation was for the greater glory of God. After giving up food and drink Rabbi Zanvil next renounced sex with his wife and all the other commandments, citing the statement in the tractate of Nidah that the dead are absolved of their debts. At first, when rumors started that he was not in his right mind, attempts were made to hush the matter up; but as his case seemed more and more hopeless, he was brought to Dr. Langsam in the end. Of course, he might just as well have been taken to Rabbi Shloymeleh of Sassov, the son of the tzaddik of Olesk, a great wonder-worker like his father and every bit as good an exorcist. Rabbi Zanvil’s father, however, had been feuding with Rabbi Shloymeleh for years and wanted his son to see a proper doctor in order to prove to the world that doctors could cure crazy people too.
Yet another frequent figure in Dr. Langsam’s garden was Feibush Vinkler, a tall, thin, uncommunicative man who, when he was not looking for water to wash his hands with or cursing the well-known Jewish Spinozist Shlomo Rubin, preferred to be left to himself. The mere mention of Rubin, however, made Feibush spit angrily on the ground, for the man had invented a mechanical dog with a gauge in its mouth that could register one’s every thought. In fact, this animal, which was controlled by Rubin from afar, had only to bark and the entire contents of one’s mind tumbled straight into its jaws and were brought by it to its master, who did with them what he pleased, sometimes restoring them to their rightful owner, sometimes giving them to someone else, and sometimes keeping them for himself and leaving the thinker’s head empty. Feibush Vinkler’s thoughts had been exchanged for another man’s, and he could not abide the new ones given him.
(Not that Feibush had ever met Shlomo Rubin in his life, for the two of them lived miles apart and their paths had never crossed. Nor, of course, did such a dog exist outside of his own imagination. If there was any truth to this story at all, it was simply that a book of Shlomo Rubin’s had once come into his possession and indeed changed many of his thoughts.)
Feibush Vinkler had dealt in salt. His tiny, low-ceilinged shop was full of blocks of it piled one on top of another, their whitish-gray surfaces glittering like a world without end, like a vision of eternity, like a covenant of salt from the first unto the last of days. Indeed, who could get along without salt? When a man was born he was sprinkled with it, and when he died salt tears were shed for him. Each time he sat down to eat he salted his food, and each time his wife cooked she salted it too, for nothing could taste good without it, not even sweets or pastries, not even dishes fit for kings. It would seem far from certain whether salt was given the world as an analogue of retribution, Lot’s wife having been turned into it, or of consolation, the sacrifices in the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem being destined to be offered with it; yet in any event, whereas kings had once sowed conquered lands with it, they now made of it a royal monopoly and took a stiff share of its profits; and as there was no arguing about the price of it with the Kaiser or haggling over it with one’s customers, Feibush Vinkler had plenty of free time to stand in his shop by a table, his hands in the folds of his caftan and his eyes on such mysterious texts as the Yalkut Re’uveni or the Midrash Talpiyot, in which the secrets not only of the Torah but of the entire universe were expounded. Feibush even found time to read Christian and pagan philosophers, though he was a strictly observant Jew and a great devotee of religious tradition—on account of which, despite his being a man of few words, the repute that he was held in was considerably higher than the income from his shop. Why waste time talking, after all, when all the arcana of heaven and earth were an open book before one?
There was in Galicia, in a place called Wieliczky, a vast underground salt mine sixteen miles by four that resembled a subterranean city—or rather, many such cities, one beneath the other, with streets of salt and houses of salt and stables of salt and statues of salt in doorways and in rooms of salt, from which hundreds of thousands of tons of salt were extracted every year. It was in Wieliczky—whose known reserves, according to Abraham Mendel Mahr’s volume of European geography Shvilei Olam (which was not to be confused with Shimshon Bloch’s book about Africa by the same name), were still increasing after six hundred years of continual operation—that Feibush bought his salt, which he resold in his shop as his mind was soaring to celestial pinnacles that few other men even dreamed of. The fact is that he could have lived his life out in honor were it not for a certain bookcase in the local study house that contained, alongside the books of Shlomo Rubin, many other nineteenth-century Hebrew volumes, in which Halakhah, Aggadah, Kabbalah, and the humble beginnings of modern scholarship were all jumbled hopelessly together. One day Feibush put a match to this case, the fire from which burned down the study house and a good deal of the rest of the town. Had he not been quickly bundled off to Dr. Langsam, he no doubt would have been thrown into prison.
Hirshl behaved toward these men as their guest, looking politely at whatever they wished to show him and listening to whatever they had to say. With Pinchas Hartleben and Feibush Vinkler he hardly exchanged a word, both men being preoccupied, one with finding oil and the other with barking dogs. Moreover, Schrenzel, the fatherly orderly, had cautioned Hirshl to keep away from Vinkler, who had a nasty temper and, when in one of his depressions, was perfectly capable of spitting in your face without giving a hoot who you were.
Rabbi Zanvil, on the other hand, befriended Hirshl and even took to calling him “cousin” in the mistaken belief that Hirshl was like himself a direct descendant of the renowned Yeshaya HaLevi Horowitz. In his head Zanvil kept a long list of the death dates of famous holy men, on each of which he told Hirshl all about the tzaddik in question, not omitting his own self, the anniversary of whose passing he observed every year. In fact, he never referred to himself without immediately adding “may God rest his soul” or “may his memory stand us in good stead.”
For hours on end, his stooped body bent toward Hirshl beneath its large white skullcap and a modest smile on his face, whose beard and sidelocks had been clipped short by the sanatorium, Zanvil spun his necrologies, which once a year were about him. Hirshl had never heard such wonderful stories in his life, every one of them brimming with the love of God and of His chosen people. Until now all he had known about the Hasidim and their rabbis was pejorative, for he had grown up in an environment where the very word Hasid was pronounced with a sneer—and while scholarly books about Hasidim and collections of their legends that showed them in a better light were available, no one in Galicia even bothered to read them, for the Hasidim considered them sacrilegious, while their opponents imagined a Hasidic anthology to be simply a kind of Jewish jokebook.
Even though Dr. Langsam treated him as if
he were healthy, Hirshl knew that he was an inmate of the sanatorium and was not allowed to leave its gates. Still, he neither complained nor brooded about this. If anything, he felt grateful, as a homeless child might be expected to feel toward someone who has taken him in.
Indeed, Hirshl had good reason for feeling this way, because he never had been better off. He had a fine room that faced out on the garden and he could sleep all night long without being bothered until seven o’clock in the morning, when Schrenzel came to give him a cold rubdown and a cup of milk, coffee, cocoa, tea, hot chocolate, or fruit juice, along with a light breakfast that did not burden his digestion. At noon, on the other hand, he was given a glass of wine to spur his appetite. Then, if it was raining outside, Schrenzel returned to play chess with him, after which Dr. Langsam returned for one of his stimulating talks. These chats must have stimulated the doctor, too, for the more he said, the more he had to say. In fact, though he had spent only the first twenty years of his life in his native town, a thousand years seemed not long enough to tell about them. Sometimes he repeated old stories to Hirshl and sometimes he related new ones. Though he had studied in famous universities, lived in great metropolises, and frequented celebrated theaters and opera houses, all these places might as well never have existed: nothing had remained in his memory, it seemed, but the little town he grew up in, with its merchants saying Psalms in the marketplace, its rabbi making bookmarks with his fingernails, and its students struggling to decipher them.
“I have no doubt,” Dr. Langsam told Hirshl, “that there are many unsolved problems in this world, and many scientists working on them, whose importance is greater than my rabbi’s. After all, they are dealing with the secrets of the universe, while he was studying things that are of no interest to anyone today. And yet I must say that while the scientists are always baffled in the end, there were at least times when we understood what our rabbi was saying. Well, he’s in the world to come now, writing his annotations with the gemstones of Paradise and no longer using goose quills—while as for that copy of Mahatsit HaShekel that he always wanted to buy, I can promise you that he and its author are sitting in Paradise and studying it together. There was a time when I felt guilty for never having sent him the money to buy it with. Do you think I couldn’t have spared the two or three kroners that it cost? But I kept putting it off, and once he was dead he no longer needed them. Anyway, I sometimes think that, even if we never pay back those we owe the most to, it’s enough that they suffer no harm from us. That may seem like a cynical thing to say, but it isn’t. We can do good to someone and never be repaid by him, but someday he will do good to someone else, and that person will do good to someone else. And so good gets passed on and the world remains halfway livable.”