Mr. Mani (38 page)

—Those are the Mohammedan cantors who call the faithful to prayer. And although I was no Mohammedan, I jumped at once from my bed with the realization that—even if it was more heard than seen—dawn was breaking. I washed my face, feeling very hungry, and made up my mind to discover Jerusalem on my own and get to know it for myself rather than as a hostage of my doctor, whose intentions had begun to seem even more nefarious since crossing the threshold of his house. I stepped outside into broad daylight, pointed myself in the direction of some sounds that I heard, and struck out across the fields, passing some little house now and then until I arrived at the gray ramparts of the city and disappeared through a gate into its narrow streets. From that morning on, I walked the old city's streets every day, my feet skipped along by its cobblestones. It was a city that from the very first I understood perfectly—which is more than I can say of any of your other Jews, Zionists or not.
I
was there.

—I was. And I got to know that stone womb that is the mother of us all.

—No, not so much the inhabitants. Jews are the same everywhere. The only difference is that there the Mohammedans take the place of the Poles; the Turks—of the Austrians; the donkeys—of the horses; and the nimble black goats—of the hogs. Sometimes, with their little beards, they made me think that they were ancient Jews who had disguised and shrunk themselves after the destruction of the Temple in order to stay on in Jerusalem...

—I wandered from place to place, footloose and missing nothing, thoroughly learning the city, in which the distances are astonishingly small. From our Wailing Wall to the great mosque with its two domes is no more than a few steps; from there a short walk will bring you to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; and not far from that are the synagogues and the holy places of the Armenians, the Eastern Orthodox, and the Protestants. Everything is jumbled together—it is a bit like entering a large shop for religious artifacts whose shelves are piled high—the believer can choose whatever catches his fancy...

—It is quite simple. You walk down a street that is no more than a few feet wide and there it is—a large wall—or buttress—however you wish to call it—grayish and covered with mosses. It is quite amazingly like the photograph you have hung on the wall of your office, Father. Perhaps the same Jews even pray there. I found it most appealing, Papa dear.

—Its formal simplicity—its improvised originality—its refusal to make any false promises or foster any illusions. It is a last stop of history, no less than that board in the train station—a blank wall with no open-sesames or hidden crypts. What more can I tell you, Father? What else? It is perhaps the ultimate dam, built to hold back the Jews in their restless proclivity to return to their past. “Halt!” it says. “No Passage Allowed Beyond This Point.”

—Only at first. I won't deny that I stood there dismayed for a moment—even stunned—gawking in disappointment. But soon enough I got over it, stepped up to the large, cool stones, and—ha ha ha—even kissed them, would you believe it? A lazy atheist like myself ardently kissing not just one stone but two! The Jews and Jewesses praying there saw that my head was uncovered and sought to comment but did not; and so I tarried for a while, thinking of this and that, until I stopped an Arab boy carrying a tray of golden little loaves and bought them all for a thaler. I stood there eating one after another—they were wonderfully tasty—I shall never forget the taste of them. From that moment on—as if I had chewed the stones and they were made of dough—my memories of the Wailing Wall do not come without the fragrant taste of freshly baked bread...

—A narrow lane. The approach is dark and dank, very intimate. On one side of you is the ancient, holy relic with its huge stones, and on the other, a cluster of homes with flapping laundry and crying babies. It is an impossible but quite real combination. I would have lingered there longer had not the ram's horns begun wailing all around me, which made me think of you in the gray fields of Poland, waiting for some sign of life from us. I was directed to the
sarwiyya,
the Turkish governor's house in the Christian Quarter, and from there I sent you my second telegram—the one that Mama says only made you even more worried. But why?

—But what did it say, for goodness' sake?

—What was unclear about it? I was even given a Turkish telegraph operator who knew German, and we made up the message together. I remember it word for word:
We are well. Will start home after Yom Kippur.

—We are happy?

—But I expressly wrote “well”! Who could have changed it to “happy”? Perhaps it was that Turk's own idea. But even if it said that, why be so alarmed by it?

—What do you mean, that was all?

—Let me see it. This is what you received?

—But the last words are left out. I paid good money for them—that postal clerk made off with them! Unless they fell out of the wires along the way—or else the Poles were too lazy to copy them...

—How do you know?

—I had no idea you could do that.

—And when you traced it back to its point of origin, what were you told?

—They confirmed it? But how could they have? What a scoundrel! Why, I paid for every word of it...

—Two piastres.

—Of course. I would never have kept you in the dark like that, without even letting you know...

—What a devilish business—he went and shortened it on his own! And he thought my visit in Jerusalem was
too
short—he could not stop telling me about the wonders of the city...

—But...

—My dears—you had every reason to worry—
We are happy
—an odd telegram indeed! A person might have thought ... oh, my poor loves ... and yet even then...

—The word “happy”?

—So it could have, Papa dear. Taken captive by our own happiness ... a wonderfully subtle thought. Bravo!

—Indeed, he was our captor, that oriental gynecologist. There was a power in him—he could move you to do anything by his presence, as confusedly soft as it was—as full of surprises too, disappearing and appearing without warning. I had already noticed how he worked his will with his family—even the boy, who sought to fight back, was constantly squelched. The Swede was all but enslaved to him, and I had seen for myself how Linka trembled all over when he flung that gory infant into her arms, thrusting upon her—a stranger from afar—a most intimate partnership. How could I have known that his effusive—his soft, imaginative, and prankish nature—was unreal—unnatural—nothing but an illusory reflection, like those of the swiveled mirrors in his clinic—of the soon-to-surface destructiveness within him?

—Yes. There was even a danger of Linka's being ensnared to work for him as a nurse, to turn herself into a nurse-concubine...

—There is nothing insane about it...

—It is not a perverse thought. Nothing was impossible by then. Why, I myself had begun to feel that morning a well-being as blissful as nirvana, a primitive, tidal oneness with that diaphanous light. I wandered among the bright colors of the fruit stands, the rug dealers, the coppersmiths, accompanied by the savage wails—now rising, now choking—of the ram's horns, in seventh heaven to be on solid ground, so brimful with happiness that the telegraph clerk who saw it decided to rewrite my cable without a date of departure, which made you here—holding the innocent gray telegram in your hands thousands of miles from Jerusalem—instantly alert to the threat that was implicit in the elimination of those words that never reached you. Is that not wondrous?

—Yes, dearest Papa, a threat—the threat of happiness—that is a threat too. And so I knew that if I wished to remain in Jerusalem as a pilgrim and nothing more, albeit a most secular one, my first task was to distance myself from Dr. Mani and his harem and to find lodgings of my own, preferably in a pilgrims' hostel. It did not take long to ascertain that there were indeed such places everywhere, little hospices that offered bed-and-breakfast, and since I inquired after one run by Englishmen, who Mani believed spoke the language of the future, I was directed to a place near the Jaffa Gate called Christ's Church, which combined a hostel with a biblical seminary. Its director was a handsome, ruddy-cheeked Scotch priest who saw at once that I was neither an Englishman, a pilgrim, nor anything resembling either, but a plain ordinary Galician Jew in need of a room, which made him regard me benevolently and usher me into an inner courtyard off the chapel, where he showed me a dark chamber that looked out on a green ravine and had a single bed. I did not ask for a second bed or for a partition, because I knew that one word about bringing a sister would suffice to get me thrown out at once.

—So I thought. I was so thrilled by the room and the hostel that I threw my hat on the bed to take possession of it and returned to the Manis' via some dusty footpaths that ran by a few small Jewish neighborhoods, plucking an aromatic leaf now and then from a bush by the roadside and leaping over the rocks in the way...

—Here and there I passed a building—a street—the start of some new neighborhood—a school—a hospital—a hostel—a sanatorium. Outside the old walls, Jerusalem is still a collection of uncollated ideas, of the private whims of individuals who have picked out some hillside and hatched their thoughts upon it. As of yet, however, no two thoughts have coalesced; there are not even any roads to connect them, just the trails beaten by persevering hikers. And thus, thirsty and dehydrated—for I had lost my way once or twice, there being no sounds to navigate by—there being nothing, in fact, but the profound silence of a holiday morning—I arrived back at the house I had left early in the day. It was deserted. The Swedish midwife suggested that I try the Bukharian synagogue, in which, she said, the service would soon be over—and indeed, as I approached it the worshipers came pouring out, among them Dr. Mani, who looked like a positive eminence with his large prayer shawl bag under his arm. He was slowly steering his little blind mother, surrounded by a crowd of people and assisted by Linka while his daughter walked alongside them; his son, dressed in black as usual, was trailing a few steps behind, alone by himself like the catchword at the bottom of a page that is waiting for a hand to turn it so that it can begin the new page.

—Yes, our Linka too. Just think of it—she, who cannot be gotten out of bed on a weekday before midmorning, let alone on a Sabbath or holiday, had risen at the crack of dawn to accompany the doctor to services, the long hours of which she had loyally sat through in the woman's section of the synagogue with Mani's mother and some other old women, a black kerchief covering her head, listening dubiously but not without pleasure to the Sephardic melodies, which do not whine up and down like ours but have a merry beat. Perhaps they derive from Turkish marches played during the Balkan campaigns.

—She sat patiently through it all, her prayer book in her lap. And now, in the courtyard of the synagogue, she was reaping her reward, because Mani was arranging her debut. He was making an odd fuss over her too, treating her like a
grande dame
and stopping to tip his hat to all his friends and neighbors while presenting her as the rarest of pearls. And of course, she played the part to the hilt, curtsying daintily and holding out a royal hand. People were drawn to her. He was more than twice her age—and yet—he behaved to her with great deference, so that—when I think of the two of them now, standing there in the noonday heat—I am shocked by my own blindness...

—Because—without a doubt—he had already then made up his mind to take his own life on account of her. That is why she was so precious to him, of such inestimable value. It was not for her own sake. It was for the sake of the horrible end that he had decided to make her the reason for. And the value thus conferred on her only spurred him on in his despair and passion for self-destruction, so that this end—the ruin he meant to bring upon himself—illuminated her also—coiled itself around her—insinuated its way into her—until her face became tragic too—a tragedy, Father—Father!—that was even greater—more terrible—than that which was to befall—that did befall!—Mani himself. And this made her more important than ever, although not so much in her own right, because the importance came from beyond her, so that she was no longer just our Linka—not just a plumpish, giggly twenty-year-old with flashing eyes from a place called Jelleny-Szad—but the deputy—the emissary—of innumerable women—some with child and some not—some mothers and some seeking to be—but all incomparably riper and more beautiful than she was—a long, long line of women ranged behind her—whom our tubby, good-hearted gynecologist was doing everything in his power to find room for in himself—was determined to redeem by means of those tragic, grotesque mirrors he had put in all the rooms of his clinic—was seeking to conjure through the medium of a red-haired young lady who happened to attend the Third Zionist Congress...

—I am, am I? You are perspicuous, Father. I was already raving then under those blue, torrid skies of a summer's end that was hotter than any summer. My shoes were caked with dust, and I was full of my morning's impressions from the walled city and wanted only to rest in perfect peace—which Dr. Mani would not let me do. “Why, it's Dr. Shapiro,” he cried out, hastening to introduce me to the departing worshipers. “He is a children's physician from the Hapsburg Empire who has come from the congress to study the methods of my clinic.” I bent to kiss the hand of his delicate mother—who, I had noticed, was partial to Polish kisses; patted the girl on the head; tipped my own hat too; and betook myself to Mani's house, from which came a sound of loud groans. Two Hasidic Jews were waiting for the doctor by the cistern in the courtyard. They greeted him and rushed him off to the clinic—and meanwhile, in a wicker basket in the courtyard, I came upon the previous night's baby, utterly naked and soaking up the sunshine, which—so Mani claimed—was just the thing to dissolve the hepatitic cells in its blood. Without bothering to look for a stethoscope, I crouched and put my ear to its chest—it was breathing quite energetically...