Only Yesterday (22 page)
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Mr. Orgelbrand leaves his work an hour or two before dark, goes home, and eats. Clerks are not wont to work too much, especially bank clerks, especially in the Land of Israel, where all their work is done in six or seven hours, and even those hours don’t bruise their fingers too much. Between one hour and the next, they bring them a cup of coffee, and between one coffee and the next, lemonade. And so Mr. Orgelbrand leaves his work an hour or two before dark, goes home, and eats, and sits in the window and looks at the trees in the garden and smokes a little pipe. For when Mr. Orgelbrand went to Doctor Pikhin to consult him about his nerves, Pikhin told him,
Medicines you want, I won’t write you a prescription for medicines, just buy yourself a little pipe, and when you sit alone in your room, fill the pipe with tobacco and smoke. And if today you don’t find any sense in smoking, tomorrow you will.
When Isaac comes, Orgelbrand takes his pipe out of his mouth and says, Isn’t that amazing! My father didn’t smoke and I sit and smoke. And why do I smoke, because Doctor Pikhin ordered me. You know Pikhin? He’s a clever and gracious man. A member of Bilu. Someday there will be a generation who will look at us as we look at the members of Bilu. How old are you, Mr. Kumer, twenty-four? I thought you were young. Anyway, you’ll live to see them point at you and say, that old man is one of the last old-timers of the Land of Israel. And everybody will look at you like a miracle, because everyone who has money to travel returns out of the Land. We should call it our ascendance there. If we leave the Land, our name will stand after us.
Isaac sits facing Mr. Orgelbrand, and even though Mr. Orgelbrand is a clerk, he behaves like a brother to our comrade and offers him figs and dates that come from outside the Land. Mr. Orgelbrand isn’t attracted to sweets, but he does like to have sweets in his house, so that if a guest comes, he has something to offer him; in the past when Rabinovitch and Sonya would come to his house, he would sweeten their stay with fruits like those.
The landlady and her daughters are happy about Mr. Kumer, even though they don’t talk with him very much because he isn’t used to politeness, and yet they like to see him in their house. And when he comes, they say to one another, Come and see, Mr. Kumer is from Austria and Mr. Orgelbrand is from Russia, and yet they’re comrades, just as Mr. Kumer was a comrade of Mr. Rabinovitch, who was also Russian. Is there a nicer nation than that, who treat each other as brothers and friends? While we Christian daughters of Christians dwell among Christians and no Christian pays any heed to us. Gone are the early days when our forefathers were cantors and preachers in the church, and consuls and barons would come to hear. Once a party of bishops came from Scotland and when
they heard our grandfather go to the Ark, they said, close to us, that with such a melody the Lord our Savior would pray to his Master.
Orgelbrand hears their talk and gazes in the air with shining eyes. He too longs for his Creator, and sometimes his soul is weak to pour itself out to God. Last year at Rosh Hashanah, Orgelbrand did something and went to pray with the teachers and activists in a con-gregation they made for themselves in the auditorium of the Sha’arei Tsion School. One teacher went to the Ark and one teacher read the Torah and one activist blew the ram’s horn, and Mordechai Ben Hil-lel preached before the blowing of the ram’s horn. You can’t say the prayer wasn’t proper, and you can’t say there wasn’t a hint of an idea in the sermon, but the heart wasn’t refreshed. At a time when human beings believe and a man can’t imagine that he can get along without prayer—prayer is prayer. Now that belief suffers and a man knows he can get along without prayer, even when he does pray— his prayer isn’t prayer. I fear, Mr. Kumer, that you haven’t completely understood me, so I shall explain further, everything a man does and knows that he doesn’t have to do doesn’t help him these days. I don’t ask you to pray all day long, but if you need prayer, do your praying regularly and don’t do your praying haphazardly, for everything that doesn’t have a fixed time is put off for anything that comes along, and if so, it is put off and put off. If you admit that you owe money to the bank and sometimes you pay and sometimes you don’t pay, you’re not reliable to me. Excuse me, Mr. Kumer, for making a parable about you, I really should have made it about me and all our comrades, clerks and managers, teachers and writers, merchants and activists.
Even though Isaac didn’t ascend to the Land of Israel for Torah and prayer, like that old man he met on the ship and like all the other old people, he was sorry that faith had slackened. If his faith hadn’t slackened, he wouldn’t have done what he did. And since he recalled what he did, he recalled Sonya. In fact, he hadn’t taken his mind off Sonya for even one hour, but he was wrong to think that all his thoughts about her were only because he wanted to repair his acts with her. If we observe the matter, we shall find that Orgelbrand’s attraction to Sonya was worthier than Isaac’s, for Isaac is attracted to
Sonya as if to repair the sin he had committed, while Orgelbrand is attracted to her for herself, because he loves her. And so the two of them sit together, Isaac Kumer and Jonathan Orgelbrand, and don’t mention Sonya, but each of them is thinking of her, one out of hope deferred and the other out of heartache.
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When the room becomes small for them, they go for a stroll in the Baron’s garden. And when Orgelbrand is in a generous mood, he invites Isaac to Laurenz’s café, for Orgelbrand doesn’t go into Café Her-mon, where all the groups talk about the director, but goes to Laurenz, where most of the customers are Germans and have no business with AFEK, and even the Jews who come there want a rest from business. Orgelbrand treats his guest to a glass of beer or a cup of punch and orders a cup of tea for himself, drinks two or three drops and puts it down, for those Germans who are experts in everything don’t know how to make tea. And on the Sabbath, when the air is pleasant and the road is comfortable for pedestrians, they go out to Sharona and drink warm milk fresh from the cow. Orgelbrand is respected by the people of Sharona, and sometimes a farmer comes out to meet him and sits with him in front of his house and tells about the first settlers, why they left Germany and came here, and why their sons left their father’s deeds and behave like all the rest of the nations. The Jews say as the Christians behave so the Jews behave, and we say as the Jews behave so the Christians behave. Both Jews and Christians have deserted God and God has deserted them, and the noose is hung on the neck of the Jews, for all good things are promised the Jews if they keep the Torah, and it’s not enough that they don’t keep the Torah, but they also take paths that are no good and take their lives from this world and from the world-to-come. Once they found an old farmer from Haifa who had served Baron Rothschild as a carter, when the Baron came to see Zikhron Ya’akov. The Baron asked him, What do you say about my deeds in the Holy Land? He said to him, The Baron shouldn’t scatter his millions for nothing. It’s not money that makes a settlement, but love of the land and love of work, and those Jews don’t know what is land or what is work. But
the Jewish Baron is stubborn and doesn’t listen to what others say, he scattered many millions and didn’t succeed much.
Once or twice, Orgelbrand walked with Isaac to Petach Tikva, and they visited several landlords, and in every single house, they were greeted with tea and marmalade. There are houses where Isaac had been soon after he ascended. The landlords don’t remember Isaac, for he was only one of many who asked them for work, and who can remember them, but Isaac remembers them, this one sitting on the porch and drinking tea and reading
HaShiloah
and suck-ing sugar and getting rid of him just like that, and this one’s wife telling him maybe he should apply to our neighbor, and when he came to the neighbor’s house he found it locked. Now they set the table for him. And after the meal the daughters play melodies of Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and Rubenstein. Many times Isaac heard about them and didn’t know what they were like, suddenly he finds himself sitting at a full table and well-dressed girls are sitting and playing their melodies. And if the girls are pleasant to Orgelbrand, Isaac doesn’t envy him, for all of Isaac’s thoughts are only on Sonya. After an hour or two, they parted and went to the hotel, where at night the stagecoach left. The hotel owner was one of the first farmers and his house was open to guests. When they ate, everybody would come and he had nothing left except his house, so he allowed himself to accept payment.
The guests sit among the tall cypresses in the garden that shade them with a sweet gloom. And with them sit some of the local people, the young educated fellows who own fields and vineyards, who haven’t yet given up their early ideals they brought with them from outside the Land, and even things that ostensibly made them forget the loss of money, like giving work to Jewish laborers, and in their naïveté they say, After all, aside from coming to build ourselves we also came to build our Land, and the Land is nothing if there aren’t laborers. Accountants laugh at them and show them with clear evidence that they will lose their money and their property will de-cline at last. And some of the accountants complain about them that they should be sued, and tell them why don’t you use Jewish laborers, for your work is done by Jews and your property is crumbling.
And sometimes they too feel remorse, for perhaps the accountants are right. For the time being they live on the money they have and several Jews live with them and they treat their laborers as comrades. They sit down among the cypresses in the garden and talk about current events and about issues of the settlement, about the Baron and about PIKA, about the truths of Ahad Ha-Am and about the beginning of Petach Tikva, about the first ones who have gone to their rest and about others who have gone wherever it is they have gone. Only the cypresses planted by the owner of the garden grow and don’t move from their place.
And so Isaac sits in the village hotel where he had gone with Rabinovitch soon after he ascended. If only they could stand on the ground. But since they couldn’t, one is wandering around outside the Land and the other is like a guest for the night. For the tree of the field is man’s life, says the Torah. If he is worthy, he is like a tree whose roots are deep, if he is not worthy, he is blown like a leaf.
Isaac took his mind off those days when he went around here in this settlement from one farmer to another asking for work. Now he sits like a guest who has bought his place with his own money. And like a guest whose money buys him his place, he doesn’t worry about bed or board. Once a farmer came from Mayan Ha-Ganim to take dung, and when he saw people sitting and talking, he came and sat among them and told that, before the Sabbath, he had been in Jaffa and there he heard that Brenner was about to come to the Land of Israel. Brenner wrote that, since a Jew has no other place in the world I shall go and try, perhaps there is a place for a person in the Land of Israel. How happy we were at that news, for of all the great writers there was no one here in the Land except for Sh. Ben Zion, and if one or two came to see the Land, they’d spend three months here more or less, and return outside the Land. Like our leaders and chiefs who said that Diaspora needs us. Diaspora didn’t need them. And if it did need them, it needed them to set an example, that you can be a Zionist and live outside the Land. And so we were glad about the rumor that Brenner would come to dwell among us. But not all who hear were glad, for this writer isn’t wont to cover up all that his eyes see.
The cypresses are enveloped in shadows and people are sitting and talking about days gone by and days to come. No one knows if the days to come will be better than the days gone by, at any rate this hour which is not past and not future is beautiful. Isaac’s heart was sweetened and he thought, Too bad I didn’t bring Sonya with me. And that fool doesn’t feel that even if he had pleaded with her, she wouldn’t have come. Weren’t his affairs with Sonya finished by now? Whether they were or not, his grief certainly wasn’t finished.
Pioneers
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Isaac and Orgelbrand got up in the morning to return to Jaffa and found the stagecoach filled to bursting. Because of the honor due to Mr. Orgelbrand, that many people need his services, the passengers agreed to huddle together and made room for him among them. Orgelbrand returned to Jaffa and Isaac had to wait until the next day, for in those days, the stagecoach went from Petach Tikva to Jaffa only once a day. Isaac could have gone back to Jaffa on foot, for from Petach Tikva to Jaffa a normal man can walk in three hours, and what is a walk of three hours to a fellow like Isaac, and he wasn’t even afraid of Arabs, for the Arabs had learned by now that not every Jew is born to die. But Isaac decided to wait until the next day and to see Eyn Ganim in the meantime. That settlement of workers, founded in the bad days, at a time when many people were forced to leave the Land because they didn’t find any work to do, is precious to us as a living and faithful testimony that our existence in the Land is possible.
Isaac picked himself up and left the boundaries of Petach Tikva and walked to Eyn Ganim. The red and black soil that used to produce thorns and briars, lizards and scorpions, now grows trees and vegetables, chickens and cattle, houses and sheds, men, women, and children. During the day the men work in Petach Tikva, some are hired by the month and some by the day, but at night they come back from their work and work hard for their own village.
How is it that a place that was desolate of any settler becomes a settled village? Yet in those days when it seemed to us that we had nothing to do in the Land, a small group of comrades who were devoted to the Land said, We shall not move from here. They gathered
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together and made themselves an association to make a settled village, that is to buy themselves so many dunams of land and work their soil. On a day when they found work with others, they would do their own work after they were done; and on a day they didn’t find work, they would work all day long for themselves. They had no money to support themselves, and of course none to buy a strip of land, for they were dayworkers, and not every day is there work, but their determination and their will strengthened their force and overcame all ob-stacles. And this is not the place to list all the details, which are known.