Collected Stories (88 page)

“The next day, Jonathan was called to take the scroll first—not by error this time. The most honored people invited him for a drink. There was talk that now Jonathan could become a rabbi or an assistant rabbi, or at least a ritual slaughterer. But Jonathan let it be known that he was returning to his scissors and iron. Zekele tried to avoid payment by contending that he did not swear but only promised, and a promise does not have to be kept. But the rabbi ordered him to build a house for Jonathan, quoting from Deuteronomy: ‘That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep.’ Zekele procrastinated as long as he could, but after the Feast of Shevuoth the house already had a roof. Only then did Jonathan make it known that he didn’t want the house for himself but as an inn for yeshiva boys and poor travelers. He signed a document giving the house away to the community.”

“He remained a tailor, eh?” Zalman the glazier asked.

“To the end.”

“Did he marry off his daughters?”

“What else? There is no Jewish cloister.”

All the time Levi Yitzchok was speaking, Meyer Eunuch was making gestures. His yellow eyes filled with laughter. Then he closed them, lowered his head, and seemed as though he was dozing. Suddenly he straightened up, clutched his beardless chin, and asked, “How did the village peddler know the road to the Holy Land? Most probably he asked. I guess he wandered over the Turkish lands, Egypt, and Istanbul. How did he manage to eat? Most probably he begged. There are Jews everywhere. Most likely he slept in the poorhouse. In warm countries one can even sleep in the streets. As for Jonathan the tailor, I assume that from his childhood he craved for learning, and the power of will is strong. There is a saying, ‘Your will can make you a genius.’ When you are idle, a year is nothing, but if you study day and night with diligence, you sop it up like a sponge. He did well not to accept the house from Reb Zekele, because it is forbidden to make a spade for digging from the Torah. As it was, he gained in addition the virtue of hospitality. Leib Belkes and Jonathan were both simple people—though not completely so. But it also happens with great men that they get an obsession in their minds. There is a saying, ‘Greatness too has its share of insanity.’

“In Bechtev there was a Cabalist, Rabbi Mendel. He was descended from the renowned Hodel, who used to dance in a circle with the Hasidim. She did not, God forbid, hold their bare hands directly. She kept a kerchief over each hand, and the Hasidim held on to the kerchief. Rabbi Mendel could have had a large following, but he disliked crowds and discouraged them. Even in the High Holy Days he didn’t get more than a few score in his study house. His wife died young, and she didn’t leave him a child to take his place after his death. Many matches were proposed, but he refused to remarry. His followers argued with him: What about the commandment ‘Be fruitful and multiply’? But the rabbi answered, ‘I am going to get so many whips in Gehenna that a few more won’t matter. Why are they so afraid of Gehenna? Since the Almighty created it, it must be paradise in disguise.’ He should forgive me, but he was a devious kind of saint—but a great spirit just the same. There was much gossip about him, but he didn’t care a fig. It even happened that he uttered sharp words against the Lord of the Universe. Once when he was reciting the psalms, he came to the passage ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.’ Rabbi Mendel exclaimed, ‘He shall laugh—but I am crushed!’ When those who opposed him heard of this blasphemy, they almost managed to have him excommunicated.

“The disciples of the Baal Shem did not believe in fasting. Hasidism was exhilaration, not sadness. But Rabbi Mendel indulged in fasting. He began by fasting only on Mondays and Thursdays. Then he started to fast from one Sabbath to the next. He also immersed himself in cold baths. He called the body the enemy, and he would say, ‘You don’t have to appease an enemy. Of course, you are not allowed to kill him, but neither are you obliged to pamper him with marzipans.’ His old Hasidic followers died out gradually. The younger men joined the courts of Gora and Kotzk. There remained in Rabbi Mendel’s court only twenty or thirty persistent followers, in addition to a few hangers-on who stayed with him all year and ate from the common pot. An old beadle, stone-deaf, cooked porridge for them every day. A charitable woman went from house to house for them and collected potatoes, groats, flour, buckwheat, and whatever else she was offered.

“One Rosh Hashanah the rabbi had no more than twenty people in his study house. The following Yom Kippur he had only a quorum, including himself, the beadle, and the hangers-on. At the pulpit Rabbi Mendel recited all the prayers—Kol Nidre, the morning prayer, the midday prayer, and the closing prayer. It was already late when they finished the night prayer, and they blessed the new moon. The beadle offered the fasters some stale bread with herring and some chicken soup. None of them had any teeth left, and their stomachs had shrunk from undernourishment. Rabbi Mendel was older than any of them, but his voice remained young. His hearing, too, was good. The rabbi sat at the head of the table and spoke: ‘Those who run after the pleasures of the world don’t know what pleasure is. For them gluttony, drinking, lechery, and money are pleasures. There is no greater delight than the service of Yom Kippur. The body is pure and the soul is pure. The prayers are a joy. There is a saying that from confessing one’s sins one does not get fat. It’s completely false. When I confess my sins I become alive and vigorous. If I could have my say in heaven, every day would be Yom Kippur.”

“After the rabbi said these words he rose from his chair and exclaimed, ‘I have no say in heaven, but in my study house I do. From today on for me it will be a perpetual Yom Kippur—every day except for the Sabbath and Feast Days!’ When the people of the village heard what the rabbi was about to do, there was pandemonium. The scholars and the elders came to the rabbi and asked, ‘Isn’t this breaking the Law?’ And the rabbi replied, ‘I do it for purely selfish reasons, not to please the Creator. If they punish me high up, I will accept the punishment. I also want to have some pleasure before I go!’ The rabbi called out to his beadle, ‘Light the candles; I am going to recite Kol Nidre.’ He ran over to the pulpit and started to sing Kol Nidre. I wasn’t there, but those who were present declared that such a Kol Nidre had not been heard since the world began. All of Bechtev came running. They thought that Rabbi Mendel had lost his mind. But who would dare to tear him away from the pulpit? He stood there in his white robe and prayer shawl and recited, ‘It shall be forgiven’ and ‘Our supplications shall rise.’ His voice was as strong as a lion’s, and the sweetness of his singing was such that all apprehensions ceased. I will make it short. The rabbi lived two and a half years more, and those two and a half years were one long Yom Kippur.”

Levi Yitzchok took off his dark glasses and asked, “What did he do about phylacteries? Didn’t he put on phylacteries on weekdays?”

“He put them on,” Meyer Eunuch answered, “but the liturgy was that of Yom Kippur. Toward evening he read the Book of Jonah.”

“Didn’t he eat a bite at night?” Zalman the glazier asked.

“He fasted six days of the week unless a holiday fell in the middle of it.”

“And the hangers-on fasted with him?”

“Some left him. Others died.”

“So did he pray to the bare walls?”

“There were always people who came to look and wonder.”

“And the world allowed something like this?” Levi Yitzchok asked.

“Who was going to wage war against a holy man? They dreaded his irritation,” Meyer Eunuch said. “One could clearly see that heaven approved. When a man fasts so long, his voice grows weak, he doesn’t have the strength to stand on his feet. But the rabbi stood for all the prayers. Those who saw him told how his face shone like the sun. He slept no longer than three hours—in his prayer shawl and robe, with his forehead leaning on the Tractite Yoma, exactly like at Yom Kippur. At midday prayer he kneeled and intoned the liturgy concerning the service in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem.”

“What did he do when it actually was Yom Kippur?” Zalman the glazier asked.

“The same as any other day.”

“I never heard this story,” Levi Yitzchok said.

“Rabbi Mendel was a hidden saint, and of those one hears little. Even today Bechtev is a forsaken village. In those times it was far away from everything—a swamp among forests. Even in the summer it was difficult to reach it. In the winter the snow made the roads impassable. The sleighs got stuck. And there was the danger of bears and wolves.”

It became quiet. Levi Yitzchok took out his snuffbox. “Nowadays something like this would not be permitted.”

“Greater transgressions than that are allowed in our day,” Meyer said.

“How did he die?”

“At the pulpit. He was standing up reciting, ‘What can man attain when death is all he can gain?’ When he came to the verse ‘Only charity and prayer may mitigate death’s despair,’ the rabbi fell down and his soul departed. It was a kiss from heaven—a saint’s death.”

Zalman the glazier put some tobacco into the bowl of his pipe. “What was the sense of it?”

Meyer Eunuch pondered for a while, and then said, “Everything can become a passion, even serving God.”

I

I
BEGAN
to dream about this trip when I was five years old. At that time my teacher, Moses Alter, read to me from the Pentateuch about Jacob crossing the Jordan while carrying only his staff. But a week after my arrival in Israel, at the age of fifty, there were few marvels left for me to see. I had visited Jerusalem, the Knesset, Mount Zion, the kibbutzim in Galilee, the ruins of Safad, the remains of the fortification of Acre, and all the other sights. I even made the at-that-time dangerous trip from Beersheba to Sodom, and on the way saw camels harnessed to the plows of Arabs. Israel was even smaller than I had imagined it to be. The tourist car in which I traveled seemed to be going in circles. For three days wherever we went we played hide-and-seek with the Sea of Galilee. During the day, the car was continually overheating. I wore two pairs of sunglasses, one on top of the other, as protection against the glare of the sun. At night, a hot wind blew in from somewhere. In Tel Aviv, in my hotel room, they taught me to maneuver the shutters, but in the one moment it took me to get out on the balcony, the thin sand carried by the khamsin wind managed to cover the linens of my bed. With the wind came locusts, flies, and butterflies of all sizes and colors, along with beetles larger than any I had ever seen before. The humming and buzzing was unusually loud. The moths beat against the walls with unbelievable strength, as if in preparation for the final war between man and insect. The tepid breath of the sea stank of rotten fish and excrement. That late summer, electricity failures were frequent in Tel Aviv. A suburban darkness covered the city. The sky filled with stars. The setting sun had left behind the redness of a heavenly slaughter.

On a balcony across the street, an old man with a small white beard, a silken skullcap partly covering his high forehead, half sat, half reclined on a bed, reading a book through a magnifying glass. A young woman kept bringing him refreshments. He was making notes in the book’s margins. On the street below, girls laughed, shrieked, picked fights with boys, just as I had seen them do in Brooklyn, and in Madrid, where I had stopped en route. They teased one another in Hebrew slang. After a week of seeing everything a tourist must see in the Holy Land, I had my fill of holiness and went out to look for some unholy adventure.

I had many friends and acquaintances from Warsaw in Tel Aviv, even a former mistress. The greatest part of those who had been close to me had perished in Hitler’s concentration camps or had died of hunger and typhoid in Soviet Middle Asia. But some of my friends had been saved. I found them sitting in the outdoor cafés, sipping lemonade through straws and carrying on the same old conversations. What are seventeen years, after all? The men had become a little grayer. The women dyed their hair; heavy makeup hid their wrinkles. The hot climate had not wilted their desires. The widows and widowers had remarried. Those recently divorced were looking for new mates or lovers. They still wrote books, painted pictures, tried to get parts in plays, worked for all kinds of newspapers and magazines. All had managed to learn at least some Hebrew. In their years of wandering, many of them had taught themselves Russian, German, English, and even Hungarian and Uzbek.

They immediately made room for me at their tables, and began reminding me of episodes I could not possibly forget. They asked my advice on American visas, literary agents, and impresarios. We were even able to joke about friends who had long since become ashes. Every now and then a woman would wipe away a tear with the point of her handkerchief so as not to smear her mascara.

I didn’t look for Dosha, but I knew that we would meet. How could I have avoided her? That evening I happened to be sitting in a café frequented by merchants, not artists. At the surrounding tables the subject was business. Diamond merchants brought out small bags of gems and their jeweler’s loupes. A stone passed quickly from table to table. It was inspected, fingered, and then given to another, with a nod of the head. It seemed to me that I was in Warsaw, on Krolewska Street. Suddenly I saw her. She glanced around, looking for someone, as if she had an appointment. I noticed everything at once: the dyed hair, the bags under her eyes, the rouge on her cheeks. One thing only had remained unchanged—her slim figure. We embraced and uttered the same lie: “You haven’t changed.” And when she sat down at my table, the difference between what she had been then and what she was now began to disappear, as if some hidden power were quickly retouching her face to the image which had remained in my memory.