Mr. Mani (39 page)

—No, Father, I did not participate in that day's birth, nor in any others. I had come to Jerusalem to be a tourist and an observer, not to deliver babies. I went to bed and had a long, sweet sleep, and that evening, when the Sabbath was over, I told Linka about my move to Christ's Church. I did not propose that she join me. “You were right,” I said. “It is best that you stay here to avoid any injury to his feelings Take a holiday from me and have many happy birth-days, so that—when your turn comes—you will know how to do it gladly and without pain.” At first my moving out so resolutely gave her a fright. Yet I knew that only by distancing myself in such a way could I eventually muster the strength to break the chains of his captivity...

—He was holding us captive, Father, without our knowing it...

—No. That evening they all helped me move—Mani, his children, Linka of course, and even the Swede, who came along for “a breath of fresh air.” Everyone carried some bundle of mine and we proceeded to the Jaffa Gate, where I took them all up to my room. We opened the window for a view of the Russian church with its onion domes and then went downstairs to that Anglican study house for a cup of tea with the men of the cloth, who were delighted with my escorts' English. After that, I took Linka to see the Wailing Wall. She faced it in aloof silence. “What,” I asked, “will you not even give it one little kiss? This morning I gave it two.” But she would not. And so we parted. I had given her her freedom.

—No. Of course we saw each other afterward. But I had given her her freedom—for the first time—and she knew it.

—I mean that you have always complained that I hound her—that I interfere—that I do not mind my own business—that I try to influence her. And so I gave her her freedom...

—The words speak for themselves.

—The entire ten days in that children's room next to the parents' bedroom, with the Turkish doll in the fez pirouetting over her.

—Who?

—Ah, the girl. She slept in the grandmother's big bed.

—In the clinic, behind a partition.

—I do not know.

—Perhaps...

—Occasionally.

—Perhaps ... I have no way of knowing ... I was a good several versts away.

—The room had to be paid for, of course. Apart from Englishmen and pilgrims, only Christ himself is allowed to stay there free of charge...

—Half a pound sterling per diem.

—Exactly a thaler.

—No, it was not cheap. But I was treated nobly; no effort was spared to make me comfortable. And their whiskey, Papa—it is unparalleled—a most mellow, a divinely inspired brew.

—The city, Papa. The city itself.

—No, not the inhabitants. The city is forever greater than its inhabitants. I plunged into it as deeply as I could—I roamed all about and around it, exploring it layer by layer—because I knew that I would never be back.

—Heavens, no, Father; I am not anti-Jerusalem; I am a-Jerusalem. After all, suppose there were no Jerusalem? I have freed myself—but with no illusions—from the dream that you will all continue to stumble about in, lost between imagination and reality—between accusation and guilt—between the fear to go on and the fear to stay put; angered by your hopeless entanglement. I have taken the honorable way out; I know what I am leaving behind...

—I wandered.

—In the narrow streets—the souks—the courtyards. Inside and outside the walls...

—I was not always alone. When Mani saw that the city interested me, he and Linka sometimes joined me. And being eager to present us and publicize his return home, he invited us all to high tea at the home of the British consul, whom he appeared to regard as his patron. Everyone there was quite taken with Linka's lilting English. Another time, we startled the Turkish pasha one morning with a surprise visit, at which we were served coffee too bitter for words. At the Armenian patriarch's, on the other hand, we spent an evening sipping chilled wine. And one day Mani hired a private carriage in which he put his mother, his two children, Linka, and me, and took us to a Mohammedan village on a slope outside Jerusalem. We went to see a sheikh of sorts, a venerable old friend of the family, who apparently knew Mani's father and grandfather; Mani visited him every year during the autumn holidays. We were ushered into a large room where the old sheikh was seated on a cushion in front of a splendid wall carpet with a dagger thrust into it. He was surrounded by the members of his household, most of them rheumy-eyed with disease. Venerable though he was, he was thrilled by our visit and appeared to be a fervent admirer of Mani's mother; he bowed his head when she spoke to him and chose fruit for her from a tray set before him and laid it on her plate—figs, apples, and bunches of grapes that he pressed on her so attentively that I almost thought he was about to put them in her mouth with his own palsied hands. He was also delighted to be introduced to the two of us; he addressed Linka as “Madame Mani,” being under the impression that Mani had taken a second wife, and immediately put a cluster of grapes on her plate too. His family took a great interest in me and wanted to know if I was a settler in Jerusalem or merely a tourist. Mani, who acted as our interpreter, began, I believe, to explain that I was touring with an eye to settling, but I cut him short at once with a wave of my hand and a word I had learned in the streets of the walled city:
hallass
—which means, “That will do.” They were so greatly pleased with it that they all laughed and repeated it after me
—“hallass, hallass!”
—while Mani looked quite crestfallen. In the carriage on the way back I felt for the first time his anxiety over our coming departure. All of a sudden he said in low tones, “Perhaps, after all, you will stay on through the holidays to see a Palestinian autumn.”

—Autumn.

—He was simply casting about for something. But I had made up my mind not to remain a day longer, even though the better I got to know the city, the more it grew on me. He noticed how it intrigued me and sometimes sent his son along with me as my guide. Perhaps too, he just wanted the boy out of the house. On the last days of our stay I would rise in late morning, descend to the quiet chapel below, and be met there by young Mani, who had a way of appearing all at once from behind the baptismal font or the altar. Sometimes I found him standing and preaching to himself, his old man's features passionate with anger.

—Hebrew, even though my pronunciation made him jeer, so that I constantly had to correct it to keep him from regarding my speech as a foreign and incomprehensible language. Still, he was a pleasant walking companion, with a quick, light stride and no end of ideas where to take me. In my last days there, we ventured increasingly beyond the walls; to the Mount of Olives, for example, which has no olives but large quantities of graves. We would stand there among the flocks of black goats, looking out for a long while at the city, and then head down past St. Elizaveta's, which he called the Church of Onions, and across the Hill of Evil Counsel to the Russian Compound. Everywhere, I noticed, he sought to befriend the Turkish soldiers; he invariably headed in the direction of their posts, waving to them when he saw them and calling out a few Turkish words. And everywhere too, I had the same feeling of cosmic space; “I am freeing myself of this city forever,” I told myself, as I followed the boy back down amid the walls, through the narrow streets and courts of the souk, “without illusion or resentment.” I was no longer an unknown stranger in Jerusalem; the same Jewish and Arab peddlers who had eyed me wordlessly a few days before now stopped me to greet me. It was then that I knew that our journey had come to its true end.

—Linka was still enthralled by the clinic. She spent her time helping Mani and the midwife. Sometimes, lying in bed at night in Christ's Church, she seemed as distant from me as if I were in Cracow and she in Jelleny-Szad.

—No. I did not spend Yom Kippur by myself. It began with their convincing me to join them for the meal before the fast. At the table, when we were done eating, Mani turned to me directly and demanded that we postpone our trip. At first I did not give a straight answer; finally, though, I said, “I must get back to my patients.” I could not for the life of me, however, think of who they were, except for little Antony, whom I play checkers with after each examination.

—Why, yes, there is Szimek too. How could I have forgotten Szimek? How is he?

—Really? Oh, my! Szimek...

—Yes.

—Tomorrow...

—My goodness, Szimek ... But where was I? Ah, yes: at the meal before the fast. He kept pressing me to stay while I pleaded my patients and Linka kept silent. That was when he let the cat out of the bag. Why, he suggested, did I not return home by myself and let Linka stay on through the autumn, or even until spring, when he would bring her back to Europe—to Venice, or perhaps even all the way to Jelleny-Szad? You could have heard a pin drop. Linka turned red. The boy bit his lips. Mani's old mother questioningly turned her blind, groping eyes toward us. I weighed my words carefully. “Linka,” I said, “is indeed no longer a child and is free to lead her own life. But I am obliged to bring her back to her father and mother. Once that is done, she can of course go anywhere she wishes.” I saw her start to protest and restrain herself. The old grandmother swiveled her head to divine the shadows at the table while Mani's wife rose to clear the dishes, shifting her glance from her shamefacedly love-stricken husband to Linka, the overgrown girl brought home from Europe who had managed to become a young woman within the space of several days ... Just then we heard a strange, harsh scream from below, followed by the frightened cry of the midwife. Mani jumped to his feet with Linka and I right behind him, for it was clear that this was no labor pain but something far worse. Quite firmly, however, he told us not to follow him; he would see to the matter himself; we should finish our meal, he said, and go to synagogue. And so he went below and we continued eating in silence until Linka turned to me furiously and said—in Polish rather than Yiddish—“What do you mean, you are obliged to bring me back?” “But I am,” I answered her quietly. “Not so much to Papa as to Mama, who is very ill. Now let us go pray for her.” I rose, thanked Mani's wife for the meal, and asked the boy to take us to synagogue.

—Why did I do what?

—It was not to alarm her. It was to bring her to her senses.

—She would never have come back otherwise, Papa ... never...

—Why alarm anyone? But the fact is ... well, no matter...

—No.

—No matter.

—I said, no matter. We went to their synagogue. There were candles burning everywhere, and it looked like a mosque with all its carpets and cushioned benches along the walls. The boy led me to his father's seat and I was given a prayer shawl and wrapped in it, because the Sephardic men wear prayer shawls even before they are married. And so I abandoned myself to their merry hymns, which trot along at a cheerful clip without any whining arpeggios, only to look up halfway through the service and see Mani at my side, in his prayer shawl with bloodstains on his fingernails. “The baby died and I don't know why,” he whispered to me morosely. I felt I should say something; but before I could, he added, “It wasn't the cord.” After that he was silent except for joining his voice to the cantor's now and then in some hymn or tune. And so the prayer dragged on into the night.

—Nor can I.

—I could not get away. We returned together across the empty fields, walking slowly with the boy trailing as usual behind us like a catchword awaiting the next page. In front of the clinic two men in work clothes were waiting for us, Jewish farmhands from somewhere outside Jerusalem. Within, in the big room, which was lit only by faint moonlight, we saw the woman lying with her face toward the wall; her husband leaned over her, trying to get her to look at him. Mani walked by them without stopping; he handed his prayer shawl bag to the midwife and led me by the hand to see the dead child in the delivery room. It was lying on a small table in the corner, wrapped in a folded bath towel—a little blue baby girl, perfectly formed, her eyes shut as though fast asleep. Mani picked her up and shook her, slapping her back as if still expecting a cry, and laid her so carefully down on a bed that you might have thought he hoped there was another baby inside her that might yet be born alive. He asked if I remembered my pathology. I nodded. Well, then, he said, why don't we do an autopsy to establish the cause of death? Although I tried to talk him out of it, he had already seized a scalpel—he was that frantic to find out—and begun looking for a place for the incision when a sound from behind a curtain made him stop. We went to have a look and found the boy hiding there—but before we could shoo him out the door, this was blocked by the father of the dead baby, who wanted the body, since his friends had come to take him and his wife back to their farm. Mani made an effort to dissuade him; thought better of it, wrapped the baby up again; and handed it, looking like a big, sleeping bird, reluctantly over ... I hitched a ride with the farmhands on their wagon, grieving with them in silence; near the Lions' Gate they let me off and I slipped through the wall not far from the big mosque. There was not a sound. The streets were deserted. I had to cross the entire walled city to the Tower of David, and I tried to bolster my spirits by singing one of those Sephardic prayers that resembled an army march. I could not get the melody right, though—and all this time I was haunted by a vision of that dead baby lying in the bed. Besides which, I had a new worry now ... are you listening, Father?

—Linka.

—I was so anxious that I awoke early the next morning, quite unable to spend Yom Kippur holed up in Christ's Church as I had planned. And so back I went to the Manis', hungry and thirsty, forced to partake in a fast that had imposed itself on me against my will. The house was empty. There was not a soul there, not even the midwife, who had gone to synagogue too. The kitchen was cold and the fire was out in the cookstove. I hurried off to the synagogue—and what did I meet on my way but a carriage, out of which climbed Mani with his doctor's bag, looking a wreck. He was returning, it seemed, from a vigil with a patient that had not gone well. We entered the synagogue together to find the congregation in the middle of the service, the military marches having yielded to heartbreakingly sad melodies. As we took our seats and joined the prayer, I made out Linka behind a white curtain in the woman's gallery; she was sitting perfectly still beneath her black kerchief with Mani's wife, his daughter, and the Swede, who was off in a corner beneath a large window ablaze with that Jerusalem light that had been an object of my contemplation since arriving in the city. It was only on that final day, however, during the Yom Kippur service, when there was nothing to do for long hours but look at it, that I began, I believe, to understand it...