Only Yesterday (49 page)

1. c h a p t e r s i x
   

   Happy Deeds and Sad Thoughts
   

   1. I
      

      At sundown, the laborers returned from their work, dirty with plaster and dust and sand. They put down their tools and went, this one to wash his face and hands and that one to rinse his throat with a glass of soda, this one rummaged in his window in case there was a letter for him there, and that one picked up
      Havatselet
      and started reading. One of them saw Brenner, ran up, and greeted him. Brenner held his hand and looked at him affectionately, like a person who wants to give his brother a gift and has nothing but the affection in his eyes. He whispered to him, Order yourself a cup of tea. The other replied excitedly, as if he had suddenly discovered what he had been lacking and said, Right away I’ll order a cup of tea. But he didn’t go order tea for himself, for it was hard for him to get away from Brenner, whom he had just met by chance.
      

      Malkhov wrapped himself in a long heavy cloak that came down to the bottom of his legs and put a hat on his head that was designated especially for prayer and for every Commandment, and said, If we were blessed, we would pray here in public, but as we are not blessed, I leave you and run to the synagogue. Our comrades who rejoiced to see Brenner said, Pray for us too, Reb Jacob. Malkhov turned his head around and said, May this person pray for himself.
      

      Malkhov’s prayer house isn’t far from his hotel, but the road is all sand and the long cloak he wears for prayer, because it is his garb of honor, weighs him down and bangs his feet, and whenever he goes to pray, all his limbs are stirred, as if he were going to do something beyond his strength.
      

      I
      403
      

      Malkhov’s wife came in and saw the fellows who had come back from work. She sighed and said, You’ve already come back from work, and I don’t know what I’ll give you. I cooked a little bit of groats in gravy, I cooked a little bit of eggplant, I fried bread in the skillet, God knows if that’s enough for a meal. Said little Yankele, I give up my portion. Said Malkhov’s wife, All the time you give up, and you of all people mustn’t give it up, look at your face, Yankele, skin and bones. Said big Yankele, Don’t worry about him, Mrs. Malkhov, it’s a good deal he’s making, he gives up in this world for the World-to- Come. Do you have malaria again, Yanekele? Said Yankele, No, but. . . But what? But today is the anniversary of your father’s death and you make it a fast day. If you don’t eat, you’ll die, just like your father. You should have gone with Malkhov to the study house and have a little drink there with the Hasids.
      

      Malkhov’s wife spread her hands in front of her, hunched her shoulders, and asked anxiously, So, what shall we do? Said Podolsky, Don’t worry too much, Mrs. Malkhov, but do what all the other innkeepers do, add a jar of water to the soup, and if that isn’t enough, add two jars. Said Malkhov’s wife, The kids stand all day in the sun and the dust, and when they come to eat they don’t find anything. And whose fault is that, my Jacob, Long-May-He-Live, who runs after Commandments all day long, and this Commandment that lies in his own house, he neglects. Now he went off to the study house, and from the study house he’ll run to the blind seer, and from the blind seer he’ll run to get supporters for the old people’s home in Jerusalem, and you are hungry and thirsty. And wouldn’t it be better if he took care of the business of his own inn? I guarantee you he won’t come back so fast. And there’s nothing I can do. Nothing. After all, I only have two hands. Two frail hands, a pity to move them. Oh dear God, You tell me, is it worth it to live in Your world? And this one sits in his study house and doesn’t think of coming back. And why should he come back, it’s good over there. There’s a kerosene lamp de luxe there and the Torah and Hasidism, and here there’s a pair of weak hands and nothing. And my feet, oh, Master of the Uni-verse, may all the enemies of Zion have such feet. And the whole
      

      body, it’s not a body, a heap of the plagues of Egypt. And this Jacob, Long-May-He-Live, wraps himself in his cloak his father made for him on his wedding day and runs off to the study house like a groom to his wedding and doesn’t think about coming back. I’m telling you, he won’t come back soon. Here, he’s coming.
      

   2. I
      

      Malkhov rushed in and called out joyously, Good evening, fellows, good evening, fellows. He took off his heavy cloak and hung it on a peg in the wall, and he took off his hat and stroked it affectionately. He saw his wife standing in the room, scolded her, She stands and preaches sermons like a preacher, go back to your cooking, woman, and don’t stick your nose into things that are none of your business. Joseph Haim, will you eat here? I won’t eat, answered Brenner. Said Malkhov, Did the woman frighten you, that there’s nothing here to eat? Delicacies her father and mother fed her are in her mind’s eye, and she thinks all Children of Israel are obliged to eat delicacies. Sit down, my brother, and eat. And you Hemdat, a piece of fish is waiting for you, may you see the reflection of his tail in the World-to- Come. Mapku, you’re one of the family, go to Azulai and bring me forty or fifty eggs. (Mapku is Gorishkin, whom Malkhov named after Abraham Mapu, because he wrote stories.)
      

      Said little Yankele, Reb Jacob, I’ll go. Said Malkhov, Sit down, you’re a Cohen, and I don’t use Cohanim. You didn’t come to the prayer house and you didn’t say Kaddish. Your father isn’t worth bothering about? One Kaddish I stole from the mourners. Tomorrow, come and say Kaddish yourself. And here Malkhov turned to Brenner and said, I knew his father, may he rest in peace. He was a worker, he worked for the Lord and worked his own land. A strip of ground he had in Hadera and he died on it from yellow fever. When he got sick and they wanted to take him someplace else, he refused. He said, It isn’t the Land that kills and it isn’t malaria that kills, but forsaking the Land kills. As he passed away, he pointed to part of his land and said,
      How we are spoiled! We are greatly confounded because we have forsaken the land.
      And you Polishkin, put down
      

      Havatselet
      . If you want to laugh, read Ben-Yehuda’s newspapers, or maybe you’re scared of the scorn of idolators. Joseph Haim, you’re a new person in the Land and you don’t know the wisdom of its sages. So I shall tell you a little bit. Brenner didn’t like to hear about Ben-Yehuda, neither praise nor blame, but because of his respect for the landlord, and so he wouldn’t look fed up with his talk, he didn’t stop his ears, but shut his eyes, like sensitive people who express their sensitivity with their body.
      

      Said Malkhov, When Professor Boris Schatz made his Bezalel, Hanukkah came upon him, that holy holiday they started calling the holiday of the Maccabees. They went and made him a joy-ous party. They put up a statue of the High Priest Mattithiah, holding a sword in his hand to pierce the tyrant who was sacrificing a pig on the altar they had made in honor of Antiochus the Wicked. They spent all night in riot and gluttony. The next day, Ben-Yehuda wrote affectionately about the party in his newspaper, just that he wasn’t comfortable with that statue they had put up in the hall, for this Mattithiah was a zealot for his religion, for his religion and not for his land, for as long as the Greeks were spreading over our land and robbing and oppressing and murdering and killing and destroying cities and villages, Mattithiah and his sons sat in Modiyin, their city, and didn’t lift a finger, but when the Greeks started offending the religion, as the prayer says, to force Thy people Israel to forget Thy Torah and transgress the commands of Thy will, he leaped like a lion, he and his sons the heroes, and so on and so forth, and they decided to honor the event with an eight-day holiday. And now, says Ben-Yehuda in his article, and now I wonder, when they gathered last night to honor him, if they had breathed life into the statue, or if he himself were alive, if he wouldn’t have stabbed every single one of us with the sword in his hand, and sacrificed all of us on the altar.
      

      The whole time, Brenner sat with his eyes shut, as if that was how he saw what Malkhov told. After Malkhov concluded, Brenner’s eyes opened and his lips burst and he started rocking with laughter. Gorishkin shouted, Lies, Malkhov, lies. Malkhov grabbed his beard
      

      and said, Mapku, shut up. Just because you’re used to profanity, you even profane the words of Ben-Yehuda. Brenner grabbed the table to keep from collapsing with laughter. When he rested a bit from laughing, he laughed again and said, A vulgar man am I. Forgive me, comrades, for that wild laughter.
      

      Malkhov’s wife called from the kitchen, Jacob, Jacob, the soup’s getting cold. Malkhov ran to the kitchen along with his son Zalman Leyb. They brought a bowl of soup to this one and a plate of vegetables to that one, a piece of roasted fish to this one, and radish chopped with eggs and onions to that one. Finally, from the box under the window, Malkhov took eight or nine loaves of bread and put them on the table. Our comrades sliced the loaves, some with their fingers and some with a knife. Malkhov looked at them with kindly eyes and said, Before apostasy enters your ears, food and drink will enter your bellies. Who didn’t get his share? You all did. Well then, eat, children, eat. Hemdat, how’s that fish? An incarnation of a monthly synagogue officer or of a Rabbi from Poland? What’s that, Yosef Haim, you’re idle. Somebody make yourself thin and squeeze in between your comrades. Fellows, make room for this guy from Jerusalem. Said Brenner to Malkhov, You’re a clown, Reb Jacob. Said Malkhov to Brenner, Yosef Haim, my brother, you laugh and I cry. They take a delightsome and good land and make it into a desert. No Torah and no Commandments and no respect. There are children here in their Gymnasium who don’t know the first chapter of Psalms. A generation will rise here whose whole wisdom will be knowing how to say How are you, Madame.
      

      When they had eaten and drunk, some of them went to bed, and some of them took books out of their packs and sat down to read. Some of them strolled around the room, and some of them went to accompany Brenner. Malkhov looked at them and started reciting, Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Brenner turned around and said to him in a gentle voice, Goodnight, Malkhov. Malkhov replied in a hoarse voice, Goodbye and blessings, Joseph Haim, and he walked three paces behind him to accompany him.
      

   3. I
      

      The night was beautiful, like most nights in Jaffa when there is no hot wind. And the sea, the sea that guards us against the aridity of the desert, smelled of saturated damp, the sandy soil was trodden flat and shone from inside. It didn’t bother the people strolling, on the contrary it was mild, as it is mild at night. And as the ground was mild, so the mood of our comrades is mild. Everyone ate his fill and knew he had the wherewithal in hand to pay for his dinner. The bad days were past when we stayed at home because we didn’t have the strength to move around, because we were hungry, because we did-n’t find any way to make money, because they gave our work to Arabs, and didn’t let us earn enough even for dry bread. At long last, the activists of Jaffa had to turn over the task of building the school to our comrades, and all those who said we couldn’t compete with Gentile craftsmen admitted that our work was perfect. Stephan saw and admitted it was fine. Urban saw and admitted it was fine. Now Ahuzat Bayit, the Home Estate Company, is about to build its houses, and it too will give the construction work to Jewish laborers. And Akiva Weiss, the founder of the society, has already published an announcement in
      The Young Laborer
      , that contractors are invited to propose their terms to the building committee. Who would have imagined that disputes and conflicts would have led to action? People who fled to the Land of Israel because of oppression and persecution and kept their bags packed like emigrants and made the prices rise, and they watched ships leaving the Land and wondered when would they leave with them, now those same people gathered their strength and their courage and worked with the builders of our land, and you couldn’t tell who came to be built and who came to build. Even the LeKaKh Company (the ini-tials of Lomir Klappn Khissinen, that is: Let’s Beat Up Khissin, Dr. Khissin, the representative of the Lovers of Zion who wouldn’t give them unemployment wages), even they recognized that there is no place for grumbling, but there is a place for work. All the activists of the Yishuv got involved in the building work for Ahuzat Bayit, led by Dizengoff, who deals with every issue and every matter seriously and calmly. For the time being, they’re building sixty houses. Sixty houses aren’t sixty cities, but we who do not aim too high, even smallness is great for us.
      

   4. I
      

Brenner doesn’t share the rejoicing. What do you want with joy here? And if they build sixty houses, have they caught even the tail of the Messiah’s donkey? Jews are wont to build houses. One mortgage lender in Lodz has more houses than all the Ahuzat Bayit Company will build, and they don’t hold him up as a model for the salvation of Israel. But he builds Outside the Land and they build in Palestine. Jerusalem is also building houses and neighborhoods, and what will all their houses and their neighborhoods add, aside from a multitude of unemployed idlers, flatterers and hypocrites, quarrel mongers, those who eat the bread of Distribution and expect all their days the charity of their brothers, the donors of the nation, the God of Abraham, the remnants of Israel sitting by the fleshpots and making
gesheftn
, who will throw them bones to gnaw on with their rotten teeth, and for that, they will pray for them at the Western Wall and at all the other holy places for the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He to send blessing and success to all the works of their hands and for them to see reward in this world and the World-to-Come. One thing we have to do, to work the land and to bring bread out of the earth. But plow-ing doesn’t make a fuss, and so few demand it. And so they make a new Exile here, the Exile of Ishmael, and they see themselves as the emissaries of the nation, saviors of Israel. But the nation doesn’t recognize them, and doesn’t want to know them. Only a very small handful of people who are poor in deed and lazy in thought follow them like cattle in a valley, for they are not yet freed from the spell of the splendid past and expect a good future when their work will be done by Arabs, and they will sit in their houses and drink Wissotsky tea. Except for the members of Bilu, my brothers and friends, aside from the members of Bilu, everything here is humbug, humbug, humbug. Yankele, what did your father say when he passed away,
How we are spoiled! We are greatly confounded because we have for-