Mr. Mani (32 page)

—Sometimes it enables you to detect irregularities in the heartbeat.

—That was just it. I could not find any pulse. Perhaps I was not gripping his wrist tightly enough, or perhaps his pulse was too weak. Meanwhile, the door opened and in came two more men with another doctor they had hunted down, a handsome, brown-skinned, stocky man wearing a white frock coat. He bowed to us all with a great show of feeling, and—blushing with emotion, although quite freely and winningly—went over to Herzl and introduced himself in English as Dr. Mani. He made some reference to Jerusalem, where it seemed that he had met Herzl before, but Herzl—who regarded him in the same slightly jocular manner—did not remember him. And mind you, all this time I was standing there holding his wrist and trying desperately—with my heart in my boots—to undo his gold cufflink and find his vanished pulse while more and more people filled the room with more and more doctors, all urgently summoned by Herzl's entourage—each of whom had gone out to find a physician and some of whom had found more than one. It was beginning to seem more of a medical convention than a Zionist congress. Of course, all the doctors stopped in their tracks the minute they saw me standing by the easy chair and stubbornly clinging to Herzl's wrist in search of his lost heartbeat—which, even if I had found it, could not possibly have been counted in all that commotion—especially since the patient, who seemed quite delighted at the sight of all those people come to treat him, would not sit still. By now he had his color back and everyone was beginning to relax since the great man was clearly alive and even laughing as if he had simply played a prank on all the doctors to assemble them in one room. But although I had no reason to keep groping for his pulse, I could not let go of his hand; it was as though glued to mine. The more doctors poured into the room, the more paralyzed I became. Everyone was waiting impatiently—although I must say, with collegial politeness—for the impertinent young physician—for I obviously felt nothing and was not counting anything—to finish his absurd examination. And yet I would not give up—not until I saw the shiny crown of my professor of pathology come floating into the room too and grew so genuinely terrified that I finally let the hand drop—whereupon Herzl, with the most magnificent gallantry, rose, took my hand once more in his own, and shook it most heartily in a grateful adieu, ha ha ha ha ha...

—Ha ha ha ha ha...

—Most thoroughly amusing, Father, was it not? Ha ha ha ha...

—Sometimes the artery is collapsed.

—Of course it has a name. Why should it not? Everything in our body has a name.

—Why do you ask?

—The radial artery, or something of the sort...

—Absurd ... perfectly ... and yet there you are...

—To think that I, of all people, who am so accustomed to weak pulses ... in the case of children it is quite common...

—Well, don't take it to heart ... in any case, no one will ever remember it was me...

—Fiendish
luck? Come, now, that is putting it a bit strongly ... why be so upset by it? I am not about to have my license revoked, ha ha ha...

—No, no one else tried to examine him. They all just wanted to meet him. They were some quite famous professors there who spoke a wicked German, and before long a group of them had formed around him while I retired to a corner—where, if you must know, I was thinking not of Herzl but of Linka, who was no doubt worrying what had happened to me—the lord only knew if she had not already returned to our hotel and lost her way in its dark corridors! And in that same corner—to which he too had retreated from that boisterous outbreak of German—was the doctor from Jerusalem, feeling rejected and rather shamefaced that Herzl had not recognized him—so much so that, when we were given the hint to leave the room and let our pulseless leader rest, he slipped out a back door and disappeared, while I—no doubt attracted to his mortification by my own—ran after him. I found myself in a long, dark hallway, which I realized at once was not the way I had come; but not wishing to retrace my steps, I groped my way onward in pursuit of the shadow ahead of me. He sensed that he was being followed and halted; took a little candle from his pocket and lit it; and held it up to light my way while waiting for me politely ... from which moment, Father, you may if you like draw a straight and ghastly line to his death ten days ago in the train station of Beirut, even though in my heart I know well that the two of us, Linka and myself, were only a pretext...

—A pretext.

—A pretext ... a pretext for an entirely different reckoning. That is, I was a pretext for Linka, and Linka was a pretext for someone else, perhaps even another woman...

—I ask myself the same question.

—I cannot stop thinking about it; cannot stanch the grief of it...

—No.

—No...

—You aren't tired?

—I? I have just begun to wake up. Beware of me, dear Papa, because the story and I have become one—my soul has been smelted to it by this fire, which has bewitched me since childhood—so that—who knows—perhaps when I finish this story I will leap into it and vanish in a heap of ashes ... brrrr...

—I do not know why, but I have had this chill in my bones since crossing the Bosporus. I feel as though I were levitating.

—That may be so. For a Palestinian like me, though, the autumn here is like winter...

—Fill my glass up, will you?

—No, not with tea ... with brandy...

—More.

—Thank you. And that, Father, was how it began: with an encounter in a dark hallway near the service stairs, where a man from Jerusalem was waiting for me with a little candle burning in his hand. I still cannot get over his having that candle ready in his pocket—you would have thought he had spent his whole life being trapped in dark passages—indeed, he had two candles, one for me too, which I lit at once with great joy. To this day I wonder whether had Herzl not had that weak spell, we would have met. Or suppose he had had it and I had not run after the man? But I
would
have run after him—I was drawn to him—I would have found him—perhaps because from the very first he seemed to me, that stocky man from Jerusalem, the complete antithesis to everything around him ... most vital with a great shock of hair ... a rather handsome oriental gynecologist...

—Antithesis.

—To all of us. To you, for instance—to the other delegates—to all those German Jewish physicians...

—I do not know.

—A gynecologist. Actually, more of an obstetrician. Do you remember, dear Papa, how I too could not decide whether to specialize in gynecology or pediatrics? You were in favor of women; Linka thought I would do better with children.

—Of course ... I can still change my mind ... it's not impossible. But this man was a gynecologist through and through—an obstetrician with a maternity clinic in Jerusalem—and something of a public figure there as well.

—About fifty. But though he could not have been much younger than you, forgive me for saying that he was still unspoiled—even childlike—yet cunning at the same time—although not in an ordinary sense...

—A real clinic. Be patient and I will tell you about it...

—Why should it be just for Jewesses? For Arabs too and Christian pilgrims—for everyone. But be patient...

—A good question! At first we spoke in broken German. Before long, however, we realized that this would get us nowhere; at which point he suggested English, which, I already had noticed, he spoke as flamboyantly as a peacock, rounding his syllables like hard-boiled eggs in his mouth. He swore that it was the language of the future— which did not deter me from throwing up my hands and switching to Yiddish, a language I saw he had some knowledge of, although it came out a mangled Hebrew when he spoke it—so that I suddenly thought: well, then, why not Hebrew itself—it is certainly good enough for two Jews groping down a dark hallway! And that was how we started talking in Hebrew, which slowly started coming back to me in the darkness, so that I thought how proud you would have felt after all your efforts to drum a bit of it into me...

—Real Hebrew, Father, as queer and rusty as it was, with the verbs completely unconjugated, just as you would find them in the dictionary. I must have confused my masculines and feminines too—and yet I must say that it was not unpleasurable to be using the language of our forefathers in that hallway, and even to joke in it a bit—because at first we kept losing our way and ended up descending some narrow little stairs to a wine cellar, each step of which did wonders for my command of the holy tongue—which he himself spoke in a guttural version of the language that sounded as if his throat were on fire. Eventually we realized that we had taken a wrong turn and climbed back up with our candles to the door we first had exited from ... only to discover to our dismay that it was locked. There was silence on the other side of it—perhaps Herzl had already been put to bed or whisked away by his friends for another session of Zionism. In any case, I was beginning to panic, because I kept picturing Linka out in the night, in that low-cut dress, looking for me high and low. Just then, though, we heard heavy footsteps, which belonged to a sturdy Swiss servant girl, who was on her way up to her room after a hard day's work. She directed us through the labyrinth to a back street behind the Casino—and a most narrow and deserted street it was; you could not possibly have guessed from it what a mob of noisy Jews had just been there...

—I already told you, Father. About your age—but unjaded and full of energy—a total antithesis...

—In what sense? In every sense!

—For example? For example ... do you think that you, Father—being the person that you are—a respected member of the community—the owner of an estate—the father of a not-so-young but quite capable doctor and a decidedly attractive young daughter— could one day fall madly—passionately—head over heels in love...

—Yes, tormentedly in love...

—You.

—With a young woman—someone like—well, like...

—Ah!

—A devastating love that would make you leave everything—the estate—all of us—to follow your beloved to the—

—No.

—Well, then...

—What?

—Ah...

—You?

—You are jok—

—Then why don't you, dearest Papa? Yes, why don't you fall in love a bit, ha ha...

—That is so. What really do I know about you?

—I can only tell you what I think.

—That may be...

—What does anyone know about anyone?

—Hardly a thing

—Two children—little ones—at my age he was even more of a confirmed bachelor than I am...

—Of course he had a wife.

—I will get to her.

—I will get to her ... don't be so impatient...

—Haven't I told you? Mani.

—Moshe.

—It is a common enough name in the Orient.

—Oh, he was Manic indeed ... just wait until you hear it all...

—Yes, the whole story—and nothing but the whole story—but please let me tell it in my own good time—it is a balm for my weary soul. Please let ... I feel suddenly gripped by such sorrow over his death!

—I am not shouting ... forgive me. Anyhow, there we were in that empty, desolate street, circling round to the front of the Casino. By now he was telling me all about Jerusalem and his clinic, which he had come to Europe to raise funds for because he wished to expand and modernize it. Mind you, I was listening with half an ear, because Linka, I was alarmed to see, was not at all where I had left her. The nearby streets were silent except for a dimly lit tavern here and there in which—when I peered into them—I saw nothing but red-faced, drunken Swiss speaking sadly to themselves. I could have killed myself for leaving her! Where could all our Jews have disappeared to? And meanwhile this Mani kept tagging after me, so excited to have found out that I was a pediatrician that he could not stop talking for a second—about his Swedish nurse who was an expert in painless births and about some new idea of his for building up the blood of postnatal jaundice cases—three of his own infants, so he told me, had died of jaundice themselves—while I simply kept nodding at everything he said, listening as though in a dream. Talk of fright! I could not help thinking of all kinds of things that a person has no business imagining...

—That she had been carried off ... that she had been misused...

—I don't know. Nor does it matter. I was very frightened. Linka and I had never been so far away from home, and by now I saw that there was no hope of finding her in those empty streets—and so I asked Mani to excuse me, because I was in a hurry to get to my boardinghouse, and I told him about my vanished sister, Well, at once he stopped his chatter and offered to drive me to my lodgings in his hansom—first the man had a candle in his pocket, now he had a hansom up his sleeve! He led me to a little back street—and there, Father, was parked a real carriage with a fancy black top and a coachman in red livery, a big-bearded fellow slumped sleeping on his seat. It was, it turned out, the gift of some Jewish banker in Zurich, who had refused to give Mani a donation for his clinic but had agreed to put a vehicle at his disposal to help him put the touch on other Jews. I can still see it, Father, standing in the dead of night on a street corner not far from the Casino with a black, thoroughbred, high-legged horse that looked straight out of the Alps—it had the glitter of the moon in its big eyes! And it was starting there—from the moment I climbed into that carriage—that a straight line—I see it as though in a vision—ran straight to his death ... to that hideous tragedy ... although the truth, I tell you, is that we were only a pretext...

—Because it is not conceivable that the seed of it was not already there, if only as a dry kernel that lies in the earth without knowing that it is a seed...

—No, Papa, no. I said I would tell everything in order.