Mr. Mani (33 page)

—If I am being obstinate, it is only to keep you from leaving me here by this stove in the middle of the night once you have heard the end of my story. Because only the suspense can overcome your tiredness—can bring you to our boardinghouse in that wonderful hansom through the pleasantly cool Basel night—our horse clip-clopping briskly over cobblestones—up and down streets whose inhabitants were already enjoying a well-earned sleep. I still had no idea where all our Jews had gone off to, especially the younger ones; they could not have all gone to bed already. But soon we reached the boardinghouse, which was entirely dark—
her
window too, which made my heart sink, because that meant she had not come back. I was so afraid of the carriage driving off and leaving me a nervous wreck in the sleeping boardinghouse that I implored my Dr. Mani—who had by now finished telling me that he was born in Jerusalem to a mother who was born there too—to stay and keep me company. Not that he needed much imploring. He was only too happy to oblige. Perhaps he craved human contact after the indignity inflicted on him by Herzl. I burst into the lobby; shook the old grandfather of a concierge who was sleeping on a cot in the dining room beneath some gleaming copper pans on the wall—like red little suns they were, glinting in the night light; snatched the keys from his hand; and flew off to her room. It was exactly as she had left it—exactly as she leaves her room at home—her dresses everywhere—her underwear all over the floor. I felt knifed by anxiety. All evening I had gone about with the knowledge that it was her first day—not the best time for her to be gallivanting around...

—No. Of her menses.

—I knew. I always know. It does not matter. I—

—I have always known since she was a girl. Since her first time...

—Don't ask me how. I know it—I feel it—I—I don't know how but I do...

—No. Never mind that, though. This is not her story but rather—

—No, she is not.
He
is—that wandering obstetric fund-raiser—that Dr. Mani—who sat there with me in the dining room, facing a little oil lamp that old gramps had lit for us, already preparing for his doom—cozying up to his pretext—because that—although why us?
why us?
—is all we ever were for him. The more anxious for Linka I became, the more he sympathized. He was falling in love with her before he had even seen her—he did not have to see her. And I was beginning to detect a certain oriental softness in him—a rather pariah-like patience—coupled with an ancient and obscure grievance—together with a knack for latching onto you and quickly putting himself in your shoes. He was still carrying on about his clinic and his attempt to raise funds for it. I could see that he wished to take my measure—perhaps as a financial or medical partner—because the minute I told him about our estate, he grew quite ecstatic over his good fortune at having run into not only a Zionist pediatrician, but a rich Zionist pediatrician in the bargain...

—As we were driving in the hansom. I believe I expressed my pleasure at the horse's light gait and compared it to our own heavy drays that Mrazhik can never get to shake a leg...

—From there it was but a step to the flour mills and the forest. He listened openmouthed, as if trying to gulp it all down.

—No, I told him some medical tales too. About deliveries in the villages. How the Jewesses scream and the Poles sob...

—But they do. Every last one of them.

—You never asked.

—They positively bawl, every one of them.

—The Jewesses? As loud as they can. It is to make sure the baby hears them and remembers to be nice to its mother after all it has put her through. But the Poles sob. The devil only knows why—perhaps, ha ha, it's for shame at having brought another Polack into the world...

—Idle chitchat, yes. But what was I to do? I was swamped by anxiety, and Mani was the straw I clutched at to take my mind off it. And he did seem a cordial and charming fellow, busily fusing himself to his pretext while the mountains turned purple outside...

—Yes, I am back to pretexts. You will have to put up with it, dearest Papa. That is the word and I had better stick to it if I ever mean to get any sleep...

—No, not yet. Because just then I heard her laughter in the quiet street, a laughter that had a new note in it. It sounded like some ticklish little carnivore's. A minute later she walked in with a new escort—no longer the children of pogroms and Pobedonostsev but three middle-aged
pans,
two from Lvov and one from Warsaw—a half anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist Pole who had been sent by the latest right-wing newspaper to find out if there was any truth to the rumors that the Jews were indeed thinking of packing their bags...

—Narojd Ojcizna.

—That is a tune we are going to hear more and more of. An insolent clown of a fellow he was, slightly tipsy. He bowed extravagantly to me and took the slyest liberties with all of us, and especially with Linka, draping his white cape over her bare shoulders—and not for modesty's sake, I assure you, but to hide the stains she had gotten on her dress in some tavern. She was quite flushed—her dress was creased—her hair was wild. She seemed flustered too by all that gross male gallantry—but believe me, Father, she was enjoying it. At once she began to throw on the table packs of cigarettes, resolutions, pamphlets, reports, manifestos—the whole cornucopia of documents we delegates had been crammed with—and then flung herself at me like a whirling dervish. How could I have gone and left her like that? Why, she had had to put these charming gentlemen to the inconvenience of searching all over for me! I clenched my fists, utterly humiliated. I almost hit her, Father. From the moment I heard that laughter of hers ring out in the night, I wanted to thrash her—
I,
for whom such a thought...

—You know I have never lifted a hand against anyone. But now I scarcely could control myself—I wanted to thrash her, plain and simple—I, who had never touched her in anger, not even when she was a little brat—not even when you went off to Vilna for Grandmother's funeral and left me with her for two weeks. In no time we were quarreling in front of everyone, right in the middle of that sleeping boardinghouse—even old gramps, who must have smelled the liquor on the breath of that Zionist goy, came tiptoeing over for a look...

—Everything. Don't ask. Everything! And most of all, that outlandish white shawl on her shoulders, draped over that most scandalous dress, which I destroyed the next day. All at once she had become the grand lady. You should have seen her holding her hand out for those Poles to kiss—that childish little hand stained with ink, which her admirer from Warsaw put his lips to with unconcealed desire—she was laughing, she was all in a whirl—a once neatly closed little pocket knife that had suddenly sprung open with all its blades...

—No, no, don't say anything. I was not looking to make a scene. And in any case, at that very moment Mani appeared from his dark corner, stepping out from beneath the burnished copper pans, and I presented him, embarrassed as he was—my pudgy jack-in-the-box—my antithesis—to everyone. “Straight from Jerusalem, gentlemen,” I said furiously, “from Jerusalem itself!” You could actually feel that mysterious city blow through the room like a fresh breeze. The Polish pans grinned—
Jerusalem
?—you can't be serious!—while Linka turned to my antithesis with a warm glance. She held out her hand to him and he kissed it (it was then I first noticed that he had a special, an endearing way with women) most nobly and shyly. “He speaks English,” I told her. “You can speak in English to him.” And so she did, without the slightest hesitation—a soft, musical English it was too, like a sweet oatmeal porridge—to which—amazed but appreciative—he replied in that peacock talk of his, the language of the future, as he called it. The Polish gentlemen stood by grinning like idiots, and old gramps wanted to know what it was about us Jews that made us speak four different languages in as many minutes. And it was then, dearest Papa—or at least so I remember it—that I was so seized by the desire to travel to Palestine with that man that I made up my mind to give our Linka a taste of the real thing—to chuck her into the dark bosom of Zionism itself. Jerusalem? Then let it be Jerusalem!

—Let it be Jerusalem!

—Yes, and the sooner the better. I could not wait to be off, if only to get all those
pans
and their ilk off her trail. And just then I thought of you, Papa, and I felt my gorge rise...

—Because I knew you would never understand and would say no.

—In plain language, that you would not allow us to go.

—Well, it did have to do with you ... or so I thought...

—But if we had asked permission, you would not have given it...

—No objection? But just look at yourself now...

—It's a fact. You are furious. You are...

—What?

—You were not angry?

—I don't follow you.

—My imagination?

—What?

—No. Where—

—You were glad? But how come? For what reason?

—Proud? How odd ... proud! You truly felt that?

—Truly? And to think that when we cabled you from the post office in Venice before boarding ship, I was shaking like a criminal...

—Then Linka was right. I misjudged you ... Linka knew better than I did...

—“Papa will only go through the motions ... in his heart he'll be on our side...” But how—

—Still...

—That was all.

—I was wrong—I never thought—I am quite bowled over. Dear, dearest Papa, forgive me! And here I had already decanted your anger into me—I have gone about all this time with your accusing glance boring into me from behind—I have asked myself, “How could you have done this to Papa and Mama and gone chasing camels and donkeys in the desert when you should have been finding yourself a wife in Frau Lippmann's boardinghouse...?”

—The congress? It was the Third Zionist Congress, Father. There will undoubtedly be a fourth one too...

—I mean ... but was it not fully written up in
Der Ytd?
The fact is, Father, that my mind was not entirely on the congress.

—A great deal of talk. Of speech-making. Of debate. Even our Dr. Mani delivered a little oration to the “Medical Committee” in which he asked for help and invited all the doctors to be his guests in Jerusalem. Why don't you ask Linka? She can tell you what made the fur fly and what was decided when it settled, because she sat through it all faithfully and did not miss a single session. You should have seen her in her embroidered peasant's dress—I had already gotten rid of that outrageous black décolleté—taking everything terribly seriously and even keeping notes—a most loyal and responsible delegate from an imaginary constituency. But what constituency was not imaginary? Was Moscow polled on its delegates or Warsaw asked about its? The fact is that I was rarely at the sessions because I was already secretly planning our journey to Palestine. I acted quite clandestinely, Papa. I did not breathe a word to Linka or to Dr. Mani, who had let slip the name of his ship, which was sailing from Venice to Jaffa on the first of September. I believe he had a sixth sense of it, though. He took to following us around, sitting with Linka whenever he could and speaking to her in the language of the future. But my thoughts just then were not of them. They were only of you...

—Of you. Of your anger—your shock—no, Father, you cannot deprive me so easily of the conviction that you were furious...

—Delighted? But how can that be? No, I don't want to hear another word, you stubborn man, you, ha ha ... Why, this most whimsical journey of ours would never have tasted so delicious if it had not been partly aimed against you...

—Against all your bourgeois Zionists. You don't know how disappointed I am, Papa dear, to hear you say that you were not in the least annoyed.

—True—it is an odd thing to be disappointed about—but there you are. And do you think it was so easy to get from Basel to Palestine? I had no notion where to begin. I went to the
Bahnhof
to ask for train schedules and information, but I soon realized that there was little of either and that the Swiss would only drive me to despair, first by not understanding my German and then by not understanding my question, since Palestine for them was not a place on the map but a location in the Bible. Ultimately, however, they saw who they were dealing with and sent me to a Jewish clerk, a soft-spoken young lady not much older than Linka, who had run away from a fanatical family of Hasidim in Vilna to attend the first congress two years ago and decided not to go back. And so she had stayed on in Basel, living from hand to mouth between congresses, during which she found temporary work at the
Bahnhof
—where the authorities had seen fit to open a “Jewish bureau” for the delegates, who—once the proceedings were over—wished to travel to various boardinghouses, hotels, and sanatoria in the green heights of Europe and recover there from their national responsibility while digesting it thoroughly...

—No, that's true. There were good people there too, conscientious and with a sense of the occasion. But—why deny it, Father—there were plenty of freeloaders also—people like myself, for example—who only came to divert themselves at the expense of Jewish destiny, which they regarded as they might a game of whist...

—Why, our whole trip had been intended as nothing more than a diversion—until it suddenly changed course...

—Hold on a minute, will you! Don't you want to hear about the Jewish clerk from Vilna?

—As a matter of fact, she was not especially pretty, Father. She was pale and rather sickly looking—a consumptive, I had already decided—but a sharp-witted and free-mannered young thing, with a most Talmudical mind. And she was an expert in the map of Europe, which she knew by heart and could slice in any manner in her head. She knew every train—the name of each station—the departure and arrival schedules—the points of connection. She could describe the compartments for you in every class—tell you where each number seat was—advise you which coaches were best—and needless to say, quote the price of everything. In a word, an incomparable young lady! She took a liking to me too, and when she heard that I wished to travel to Palestine she all but made the journey her own, as if she intended to go with me. Despite her doubts about Mani's Greek ship that was sailing from Venice, which she thought too light a craft, she dashed off a telegram to the agent reserving us two of his best cabins and began to plan our route. She was—how shall I put it?—most enthusiastic, and at once my flagging spirits revived. And so I roamed back and forth between the congress and the
Bahnhof,
hatching my secret plan, which still seemed to me little more than a fantasy. On the afternoon of the third and last day of the congress I went to see my little consumptive and was handed a handsome folder with our train tickets, our travel papers, and our entire itinerary written out in Yiddish—and a most ingenious itinerary it was too, with all the travel at night and the days kept free for touring. Nothing had been left to chance: where we would stop, and what we would eat, and the sites we would see, and what it would cost—and of course, how we would return from Palestine ... she had planned every step of the way. All that was missing was the height and direction of the waves ... which, alas, Father, turned out to be the most important thing of all, ha ha...