Mr. Mani (35 page)

—Yes. I had an attack of panic and wanted to turn around and head back—to pretend that it was all just a fantasy—a passing dream—that we had indeed never left Lugano. But when—exhausted and practically sleepwalking—we stepped out of the train station onto the Grand Canal and saw the marble palaces shimmering above the slimy water—saw that city—that jewel of culture—tottering on the banks of its fetid, scummy waterways—we grasped in a trice how magnificently tenacious the human spirit is—we felt such a surge of love for humanity—for its suffering and—yes!—its epidemics—that we walked—wide awake now—into that dream of our own free will, because Venice is in fact a waking dream...

—Yes ... yes...

—Yes ... we remembered ... we both remembered it simultaneously...

—Yes ... yes ... so you were...

—It was Grandfather who paid for that trip? What ever made him so bold and original...?

—Yes ... we were following in your footsteps without having planned it that way ... how cunning the human soul is!

—Thirty years ago! Wait ... that was in 1869! We kept imagining how the two of you must have looked then—you, Father, still with your sidelocks—a Jew in black in a black gondola, ha ha...

—A young woman, of course ... hardly more than a girl ... the same age as Linka...

—Thirty years, I kept telling myself. Perhaps I was even conceived there, eh, Father? The canals have rather a placental smell ... was it there?

—But we wrote you every day!

—In back of San Marco, in the Hotel Roma...

—Two rooms, of course—each of them palatial...

—A thousand lirettas per diem.

—You can figure it out according to the exchange rate.

—Quite sumptuously ... and no one would believe that Linka was Jewish ...
ma no,
they simply all said...

—Terribly hot.

—There was not a sign of it—a pure figment of the literary imagination ... One morning we crossed paths on one of the canals and called out jokingly, “Where is your plague, signore?”

—We were careful, naturally. We drank wine instead of water and asked for tea when we were thirsty and let it cool while looking out at the sea that sent its long, lavishly bejeweled fingers into the city—fingers, mind you, that could easily have seized and swallowed us had the tide but risen a little ... On our last evening we went to the harbor to see if Mani's ship really existed. And indeed, it looked like a mirage, a small, flimsy thing equipped with an auxiliary sail. I shuddered at the sight of its frailty—but Linka just laughed as though drunk and insisted on going to a restaurant by the water to eat seafood.

—Shellfish. Clams—snails—all sorts of underwater grasshoppers that are fried in butter...

—I don't know what got into us ... perhaps our excitement ... or the sheer abandon of sucking away at all those pinkish mollusks...

—Perhaps we feared ending up at the bottom of the sea without ever having tasted any of those creeping-crawling-Christian delicacies...

—Most heathenishly ... Linka could not eat enough of it...

—Boiled—fried—grilled ... were you not there?

—No matter. We ate, and the next morning we rose early and went to the harbor to make sure of our cabins. We hung our clothing in their little closets and went ashore again—and only then, when I knew that you could no longer call us back, did I send my first telegram and let Linka post the letters to you. Then we reboarded the ship and waited on deck for Dr. Mani—who, however, did not appear. There was a steady flow of Arabs, Egyptians, Greeks, Turks, even an English couple, even some Russian monks—but our doctor had vanished into thin air, as if he indeed had been a fantasy of ours. A chill ran down my spine. What was I to do? Where, madman that I was, was I taking her? I was all for abandoning ship while there was time, but Linka refused to lose hope—no, not even when the ship began to rumble and a large sail was run up on the yard. And just then what did we see but the same carriage that had set out from Basel in the dead of night, crawling up the pier beneath its cargo—its coachman hatless, jacketless, in his shirtsleeves—his beard unkempt—most agitated and besotted—cracking his whip at the pavement. Beside him was our portly Dr. Mani in his white suit; bareheaded too, with his hat tied to a lanyard on his shoulder; but fresh-looking and in fine fettle as he ordered the longshoremen to unload. We shouted to him from the deck—he saw us at once and waved his hat buoyantly—the plotters and deckhands fell upon the carriage and—for time was short—quickly whisked all its baggage to the hold. Meanwhile, the coachman was tussling fiercely with Mani, who was wagging a little black notebook at him. We had no idea what the fellow was so upset about—he kept clinging to the bridle of the horse, which was pawing uneasily—until suddenly the Greek deckhands returned, hustled him away, freed the horse from its harness, pulled a large gray sack over its head, and—cheered by the onlookers—tugged it with much hilarity aboard the ship. Mani followed close behind them; the rope gangplank was raised; and the ship, which was straining at the leash, began to move from its berth, leaving the Zurich banker's hansom all alone on the pier with its traces drooping on the pavement. The big coachman stood in the space vacated by the horse, a despairing and incredulous figure, until he and his carriage shrank to a single small dot.

—Yes, dearest Papa. He made off with the horse. He would have appropriated the hansom too, had it been possible to get it aboard ship; he would have shanghaied the coachman, could he have gotten away with it; he would have ripped out the cobblestones beneath the carriage wheels had he been able to, so great were his despair and anger at the rich Jews who had turned him down. He was an infinitely hungry man; and had I but taken the trouble to scrutinize that desperate, that artful hunger of his instead of mooning at him and Linka bantering in English and bringing each other up to date on their adventures, I would have had the wits to realize that it could not be sated by a horse—no, not even if it were the noblest thoroughbred.

—The horse? I will get to it in a minute ... You are just like a child, Papa dear...

—In a minute ... For the moment I was still gripped by fear and anxiety, although I must say, by pleasure too. I thought of my telegram that was speeding, letter by letter, through the air to you—humming unchallenged over the wires and down through the tile roof of the old post office—handed there on a gray slip of paper to Wicek—who would jump on his bicycle and pedal off with it to your office, for you to read it between consignments of flour ... Such were my thoughts as we brushed through the mists of Venice, which—golden and wondrous—vanished in a violet fog. I sought to fix my mind on the rocking motion of the black waves beneath me, leaning on the railing and breathing in the new salt air. At first it was pleasant, like being an infant laid in a cradle. Little by little, however, I began to grasp that not only was the motion not going to cease, it was going to grow even greater. We started to pitch more strongly, and with it came the first wave of nausea. My body felt cold. The very soles of my feet were covered with a chill sweat. I began to vomit, throwing back to the sea all its denizens of the night before—followed by my breakfast in the hotel—and then the steak from the night train to Venice—and on and on, wave after wave until I had puked out my guts, which I would have heaved into the great ocean too if only they had been detachable—after which I buckled to the ground, collapsed on the wooden deck, and passed out...

—Yes, seasickness, of the malign nature of which I could have had no idea. To think that a man can live his whole life and never know that the sea is not just a compendium of rivers! Most of the voyage I spent drugged with sleeping powders that our friend from Jerusalem prepared for me, limply sprawled on my cot in my little cabin. Linka and Mani ministered to me with English tea, dry biscuits, and soft gruel, all conveniently easy to regurgitate. They did their best to cheer me up with funny stories about the black horse imprisoned below in the hold; it too was seasick and quite wild-tempered, kicking out to protest its destination—it was not, after all, a Zionist—and if fate had decreed that it be one, it did not wish to be of the pioneer variety—no, it would have vastly preferred to wait for Dr. Herzl to obtain his international charter from the Turks so that it could make the voyage first-class with the accompaniment of a German naval escort, ha ha...

—Ha ha ha...

—Well, we are landlubbers, solid citizens of Central Europe—is it not inhuman to toss us up and down on the waves?

—Unremittingly, for seven whole days. All the way to Crete, which is the island that ship is named for, because that is its port of call on its route to Europe and back. Indeed, legend has it that Europe was born there...

—Only one night. It is a night that the sailors spend with their wives in their shanties. I demanded to be brought ashore—where, on the sand amid some rocks, I curled up beneath a blanket and clung with all my might to terra firma, trying to put my shattered self back together while watching Mani and Linka lead the black horse in its headsack out of the hold, because the captain refused to put up with its tantrums any longer and demanded that it disembark.

—Yes, Linka too. What with my sickness and the horse they had grown quite close to each other—although now I know that it was not until that bright night—that night strewn with stars on that strange and desolate isle—that it started...

—Their romance—their love—their bond—their passion—their dependence—their pity ... will that do? The minute I saw him insist on taking that horse aboard ship, I knew that there was nothing simple about him, that he was most exceedingly Mani-fold...

—They sold it that night. Some Jewish trader took them far inland to find a buyer in one of the villages.

—Where are there not Jews, Father? Tell me that Tell me!

—He asked her to help negotiate the sale. He must have sensed that a canny merchant's daughter would know how to drive a hard bargain.

—Did I not already tell you? A wife and two children.

—Of course we did. A rather bleached-out woman, a bit older than him. A stay-at-home, vitiated by three infants who died soon after birth...

—That same night.

—I was stretched out on the sand, swaddled in my blanket, gazing up at the stars. I could feel the whole island rocking up and down in the water. When I saw them come back late at night, I understood that something had happened They seemed suddenly timid with each other—careful—even wary—and there was something too about the way Linka flung herself on me, about her worry for me...

—They had sold the horse. I envied its being able to remain behind in the mountains.

—How extraordinary that you should want to know a pointless detail like that...

—Don't ask me. Ask Linka. She was a party to the sale.

—Three more days to Alexandria. And then to Jaffa, where we docked on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

—I had nothing left to throw up. My seasickness had turned into sleeping sickness, I simply could not keep awake. It was of course from those powders that Mani used to calm the nerves of his parturients. The morning we reached Jaffa, I was brought out on deck to revive before the Turks decided that I must be ill with the plague and could not be admitted to the Holy Land...

—No. It does not exactly have a harbor. The ships cast anchor at a distance from shore, and the stevedores come aboard and throw you down into dinghies.

—Mohammedans, of course.

—Local residents.

—Are you back to that again? Why should they be nomads? Where do you want them to wander to?

—In a word, they are not nomadic.

—Most in houses. Only a few in tents.

—I did not count.

—Don't be in such a hurry to dismiss them...

—The Turks? They are adorably lazy and corrupt ... We were not asked many questions. Mani's British passport worked wonders.

—The immensity of the light.

—Because there is nothing to deflect it. No forests. No woods...

—Here and there you see a tree.

—Soft white sand. Golden dunes. They are pleasant to look at, but wearisome to walk in. Your legs grow enervated.

—It is a sunny country. There will be enough sunshine for all of us there, that much I could see at once.

—We went straight from the port to the train.

—Yes, a real train. It runs from Jaffa to Jerusalem. It is smaller and slower than our own trains, a bit childlike. But since we arrived on a Jewish holiday, and the passenger trains in Palestine are religious also, we had to—

—Does that please you? I knew it would.

—They grumble and put up with it. It is the price paid for the privilege of living in the Holy Land.

—To a fault. But loathe to be stuck in the sands of Jaffa—Mani had promised his household that he would arrive in time for the holiday—we hurried off to a freight train, which was transporting—guess what, Papa!—what do you think?

—Guess.

—Guess again...

—Barrels of water!

—Ordinary drinking water. It had been a dry, thirsty summer in Jerusalem, and—since the Danube has yet to be diverted there—they needed a resupply of water...

—A single pipe that cuts across the mountains.

—It is not a desert—not yet—but the countryside is neglected—you see nothing but boulders and rocks...

—A few olive trees—bushes—all sorts of brambles. There is a tindery smell of straw and sometimes a sharp whiff of mint...

—There are no mountains, Father. There are grayish hills, which look like ... like ... I don't know what. Like hills...

—I was glad to be getting away from the sea, even though it was odd to be entering Palestine in such a fashion, in a sealed boxcar among big quiet barrels of water. And at the same time, I was delighted to be done with the diabolic motion of the waves.