Only Yesterday (29 page)

And said Bloykof, As you know me, I won’t set foot in the holy places. I leave that to those who run from one holy place to another holy place. It’s enough for me to be in Jerusalem. But there is one place in Jerusalem that I visit once a year on Shavuoth, and that’s the tomb of King David, because King David is dearer to me than all the Jews in the world. A mighty king who was preoccupied all his life with wars with Goliath the Philistine and all the other wicked men, and even the Jews, on the contrary, certainly pestered him a lot, and nevertheless he took time to play on the harp and to make songs for all the miserable and depressed—how can I not love that king? And so, every year on Shavuoth, in the morning, I go to his tomb. And when I go to David, I don’t eat anything, not even a drop of cocoa, so that I won’t feel superior to the poor and the destitute who stand and recite the Tikkun all night. And I wear my handsome shirt woven with red stripes that I wore on my wedding day, and my best clothes, as befits a man who is going to a king. Last year on Shavuoth, I went as usual to the Old City. And that day there was a heat wave, as usual here in Jerusalem, for every Shavuoth such a great heat wave comes over the city that you think you’ve been thrown into a fiery furnace.

But I don’t deign to notice the heat wave or anything about it, and I walk on and meditate on the King of Israel, how he took his harp and played it, and as I walk, the sound of those sweet melodies he made into psalms sweetens my way. And even though I don’t know any melody by heart, I do know that if I open my mouth and sing, all those melodies will come out by themselves and join together into one song. But I’m a polite man and I don’t open my mouth. And that melody keeps playing all by itself until I want to cry from its sweetness. My head suddenly started spinning and my legs collapsed. You think it was because of the heat wave or because I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and so I tell you, no, but because of that sweetness. And now I no longer feel my legs or my head, but I am fluttering in space like a string that broke away from the harp and flutters in the air. A man over sixty years old came to me, with a full beard and long sidelocks, and took me and brought me to the alley of the Karlin study house and sat me down on a stone and brought out a cup of brandy and put it to my mouth, and sliced me a piece of sweet cake. After I came to, I was amazed, a Hasid with a full beard and long sidelocks, how does he take care of a clean-shaven man in a short coat? I’m not wont to hide my thoughts and I said to him, If you had known that I was a sinner you certainly wouldn’t have given me your brandy and cake. He smiled at me and said, Why are you proud of your transgressions, you haven’t got any strength in you to sin, after all, you don’t even have the strength to drink that little cup of brandy. I took a liking to that Hasid and asked him, What city are you from? He told me the name of his city and it turned out that we’re from the same city. When I heard that, I didn’t let go of him until he told me where he lived and everything about him. A few days later, I scraped together all the money I had in my house and went to him, and found him sitting over a book, and his house was like the houses of all the poor and destitute in Jerusalem. I said to him, I came on business. He put his handkerchief on his book and said to me, From the day I was worthy to dwell in Jerusalem I have left all my business and I deal only in Torah and prayer. I told him, That’s the business I’ve come on. I give you five Bishliks and I’m willing to add more, up to eighteen Bishliks, if you promise me that you will say Kaddish after my death. I immediately put before him all the money I had, those five Bishliks. He lifted his hands to me joyously, and said, Blessed is he who bestows good things upon the guilty. The money I shall take, for I need it, but to say Kaddish after your death I cannot agree, for if I die before you what shall I reply to the Divine Court, that I took money improperly, but I have an old father, and the wife of the Rabbi of Shutz, may she rest in peace, promised him that he would live a hundred and twenty-seven years, and she was a great saint and showed great wonders, for she had the rod of Rabbi Meirle of Premishlan. And you, as one can see from your face, are no more than thirty, and even if God gives you seventy years, my father will still be alive seven years after you, for he’s now close to eighty. Let’s go to him, he’s a merciful man, and he’ll agree to your wish. We went to him and I placed my request be-fore him. He accepted the responsibility. And he even added a promise on his own to study a chapter of Mishnah for the exaltation of my soul.

Mrs. Bloykof wiped the tears that were rolling on her young and handsome face. And even Isaac’s eyes were excited and shed a tear. Samson straightened up to his full height, smiled and said, I was poking fun at you, I don’t want to die, great work is waiting to be done by my hand and I promise you that I won’t leave the world until . . . Even before he finished his words, he started wheezing. His neck turned red and his veins were stretched and his face turned blue like a spleen and his fingers turned pale, as if the blood abandoned them. He swayed back and forth and shouted, S’blood, that wheezing doesn’t let a person talk with his friends. Why are you croaking at me, did I do anything to you? He looked at Isaac and said, What do you say to that, they shout and bleat like a beheaded heifer. Mrs. Bloykof quickly wiped the phlegm off his mouth. Samson gently ca-ressed her hands and said, So where were we?

Before the Painters of Jerusalem

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Within four or five days Isaac became an affiliate of the painters of Jerusalem. The wages his boss paid him were meager, nevertheless he consented, for others wouldn’t agree to give him even that paltry wage. Isaac went to work as a daily laborer, from sunrise to sunset. From Jaffa, Isaac had brought fine colors he had bought from a shopkeeper from Odessa, and the painters of Jerusalem called them the colors of the Viennese, after Isaac, since Isaac is from Galicia and Galicia is located in the states of His Majesty the Kaiser and the cap-ital city of His Majesty the Kaiser is Vienna, the city of Kaiser Franz Joseph, who spread his grace over most of the Ashkenazi residents of the Land of Israel and took them under his wing to defend them against the wrath of the oppressors.

Isaac was affable to his companions and his companions were affable to him, as craftsmen in Jerusalem tend to be affable to everyone. For their spirit is low and their mind is humble, for they are lowly and humble in the eyes of the officers who give them Charity according to the number of souls in their family, and don’t add to their allowance any special money that comes from time to time, as they do for the Torah scholars and other privileged people. But Isaac was from Outside the Land and most of the Jerusalemites see everyone from Europe as if the keys of wisdom had been turned over to him and they consult him on all difficult matters. Isaac didn’t put on airs with them, but on the contrary, humbled himself and replied, You surely wanted to do thus and so, and what you wanted was right. If they told him, That didn’t occur to us, he replied, You clowns, you want to test me. And they are astonished and don’t know what to be

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amazed at first, either the naïveté of an Austrian or the humility of Isaac. It wasn’t long before Isaac won the hearts of his companions and they gave him a good name, as a person who knows how to use his colors, which is not true of every painter. We don’t know if Isaac was more adept in his craft than all the other painters in Jerusalem or if his companions thought he knew more than they did. Either way, both those factors were of great benefit to Isaac. Things reached such a pass that once, the Russian Consul needed a painter and Mr. Solomiak brought him our comrade Isaac, for Russia will do nothing in the Land of Israel without first consulting with Mr. Solomiak, and when Mr. Solomiak heard the praise of Isaac Kumer, he brought him to the Consul. And what happened to Isaac with the Russian Consul happened to him with the Austrian Consul and the German Consul, for in the Land of Israel, when the Consuls see what their colleagues are doing they hasten to do the same, for they get nervous about their honor and are quick to show Jerusalem their power. And what happened to Isaac with those, happened to him with the French Consul, and he praised Isaac to Antebi. And when Antebi heard Isaac’s praise explicitly from the French Consul, he tied the cravat in his collar. And when he went to welcome the Pasha, Antebi told him, Here, I’m sending you one of the artists of our school to re-pair what time has damaged in the parlor of His Supreme Highness. And who did he send him? He sent him our comrade Isaac Kumer. And our comrade Isaac wiped every winespot off the walls of the Pasha’s parlor which he and his colleagues had spilled in their drunk-enness on the days of Ramadan, and he painted the walls to the Pasha’s pleasure. And the Pasha was grateful to him. And when they needed to repair their temple on the Temple Mount and wanted to bring painters from Egypt, the Pasha said, Here, I’ll send you a Jew-ish fellow. Next to him, all the Egyptian craftsmen are like a mosquito in front of a camel, and he sent them our comrade Isaac. And Isaac may have been the only one to enter the Holy of Holies and to practice his craft in the place of our Temple, which all the other craftsmen of Jerusalem are afraid to enter for we are defiled by corpses and do not have the ashes of the heifer. Too bad our comrade Isaac isn’t much of a a storyteller and can’t tell what his eyes saw

there. Isaac didn’t make much money, for anyone whose hands are clean, who doesn’t cheat and isn’t mean, who does his best and doesn’t rest, will never see his labors blessed. But Isaac’s needs were few and his food was cheap and his rent was low and he could support himself and even have new clothing made. And Isaac did need new clothing, for the clothes he brought with him from Jaffa were light and the climate of Jerusalem is hard, and anyone who doesn’t know that is liable to come to misfortune.

Not every day does Isaac work for lords and consuls, pashas and mosques. Isaac’s main work is with landlords, ours and theirs. Some have warm hearts and good taste and are glad to embellish their houses with handsome colors. And some are stingy and miserly and grumble and are angry that they have to invest their silver and gold in paint. And as for wages, some are generous with words and crown you with gold for your fine work, and when the time comes to pay up, they deduct a Bishlik here and a Matlik there. And some are difficult people who are envious of others’ good, and the laborer has to take great pains to get a penny out of them. At first, Isaac hired himself out to others. Then he started working sometimes alone and sometimes with others. At that time, he was working with an old man and a boy from a family of painters in Jerusalem. The old man’s son, the boy’s father, left for America to try his fortune. But they found a filament in one of his eyes and didn’t let him in. So he went somewhere else and didn’t come back. The old man took the grandson to teach him the work. The old man’s strength was gone and the grandson hadn’t reached half his strength. They work humbly and don’t raise their eyes above their hands.

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Our comrade Isaac doesn’t raise his eyes above his hands either, and does his work in total silence. What is there to say? If we take everything into account, we’ll find that silence is better even than those things we must say. How much trouble and suffering would we have spared ourselves if we weren’t enthralled by language. If not for the excess of words Isaac said to Sonya, he wouldn’t have confused his heart and wouldn’t have sinned and betrayed his colleague. What did

Isaac have left of all his conversations with Sonya? She’s in Jaffa and he’s in Jerusalem, and between Jerusalem and Jaffa rise high mountains. Once Isaac came upon a prayer house and there was a preacher there, Reb Grunam May-Salvation-Arise, who preached to the con-gregation, castigating the sinners whose instinct tempts them to com-mit sins, and when their instinct sees that they are drawn to sin, it raises the price of the sins to them, to wear them down, and at last it draws the sin to one place and the sinners to another place, until their eyes bulge and they don’t enjoy anything. Like those who tease dogs, show a dog a chunk of meat and when the dog jumps up to catch it, they remove the meat from him, until he finally goes mad with desire.

Isaac mixes his colors and passes his brush over the window shutter. Before it became a shutter, it was a tree growing among the trees of the forest and the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He blew wind over it and brought rain down on it and made dew flourish on it and birds nested in it and chirped and sang there. Then came woodchoppers and chopped down the tree. The birds dropped off and fled. And all the cares of the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He seemed to be in vain. Then the wood was taken from place to place, on rivers and seas and over land until it came here. A carpenter saw it and bought it. He planed it and polished it and made it into boards. He joined the boards together until it became a shutter. The shutter was set in a wall to keep off rain and wind and sun and birds. Now Isaac stands at the shutter and passes his brush over it and spreads paint on it, just as Isaac’s companions are doing with the other windows. Isaac picks up his eyes and glances outside. Mountains and hills, steep and rising, and deep valleys descend, and silence settles there, and another silence comes and swallows the first silence, and cliffs and rocks rise up and grasses sprout in the cracks, like the blisters of a rash, and a sort of gray blue purple light shines on the blisters, which aren’t really blisters but grass. And the light capers among the rocks and all the rocks sway like a flock. And a sound emerges from them like a shepherd’s pipe. When Isaac was a child, he learned that Joseph the saint was a shepherd and Our Teacher Moses was a shepherd and King David was a shepherd. Now he stands in the place where the shepherds of Israel stood and lambs and goats graze and an Arab shepherd shepherds

them. Isaac’s heart is stirred and he begins to sing Hemdat’s songs. How many days, how many years had gone by since the day Isaac first read that song, how many sorrows had Isaac gone through, but whenever he brings the song to his lips, his heart pounds like the first time, like a man who is tempted in his trouble to joy and rejoicing. Isaac’s two companions heard it, raised their heads amazed and astonished, for never in their life had they heard a man singing as he worked.