S. Agnon - A Guest for the NIght

But I did not go to Genendel. There are days when a man seeks his own good and shuts his eyes to other people’s troubles. Before I could take to heart the virtue of visiting the sick, my heart drew me to another place: to the street of the Stripa, where a house stands in which I lived when I was a child. I had been there a thousand times; that day was the thousandth and one.

I am a son of respectable folk and I love the houses where I dwelt in my childhood. First, because a man’s house is his shelter from the sun and the cold, the rain and the snow, the dust and noise of the streets; and second, because a man’s house is his own domain, which he acquires in this world as a portion divided off from the world, in which no one else has any portion, nor does it make any difference whether he lives in a house of his own or has rented it from someone else. Father, of blessed memory, did not build a house for himself, and therefore we would move from house to house and dwelling to dwelling. In one of them I started to learn the Bible, in another the Gemara, and in another the Shulchan Aruch . Some are in ruins and some half in ruins, while of others nothing has remained but the site. But there is one house that still stands; you might even say that it is more beautiful than at first: this house is the house of the old tinsmith, which Dr. Zwirn bought from him and renovated. This war destroys with one hand and builds with the other. Before the war, no one went to Zwirn. After the war everyone began to need him, for some of those who came back from the war got hold of other people’s houses, the first owners took them to court, and there was no lawyer except Zwirn. So he grew richer and richer, and bought many houses, of which this was one.

This house belonged to an old tinsmith, whom they used to call the widower, for when his first wife died in childbirth during the first year of their marriage, he did not marry again, and remained a widower all his life — which was not customary in the early days, when a man would bury a wife and marry another.

By the time we moved into his house, the tinsmith had given up his trade. He and his only son lived in the festival succah in the attic, which he had made into a kind of room, and the rest of the house he rented to Father. In this succah he lived, cooked for himself and his son, and attended to all their needs. We never heard his voice all day, except in the morning, when he would come down from the attic and say “Good morning,” looking at us through his spectacles with great affection, and go away.

These spectacles occupied my attention a great deal, because one eyepiece was made of tin and I wanted to know why, until one of my friends explained. According to his story, once after the festival a handsome child came to him and said to him, “Father, make me a lantern; the winter is coming and we study at night.” Now that child was not born of woman and the tinsmith did not perceive it, though he should have, as we shall see later on. Three days later the child came to take his lantern. “Wait until I make a holder for the candle,” said the tinsmith. “I do not need a candle,” said the child, “Father’s eye will serve me as a candle.” The child took the lantern and went away. A wind blew and the tinsmith’s eye began to throb. “What is this?” said he. “The wind is blowing into my eye, as if it were empty.” His neighbor looked and said, “Your eye has come out.”

I stand in this street, where I dwelt in my childhood, and I remember days gone by when I went to the cheder classes and Kuba the tinsmith’s son went to the Baron Hirsch school. So long as he went to school and I to cheder we were not friends, for there was an iron barrier between the cheder children and the pupils of the school, for the first were preparing for the study of the sacred books and the others for trades or professions. When he started high school and I went to the Beit Midrash, and from there to the Zionist group, we drew closer and became friends. First, because I wanted to hear from him about Homer and Mickiewicz, and second, because he wanted to hear from me about Zionism. Where he is now, heaven only knows.

Since I had told Zippora that I was going to Genendel, I said to myself that it would not be right to deceive the child, so I left the street of the Stripa and went to Genendel.

Genendel was better, but had not recovered. She sat on a chair, all wrapped up, with a woollen blanket on her knees. Her eyes were open and her lower lip quivered incessantly. Beside her sat her brother Aaron, stroking her cheek, while she stroked his hand. It was three days since he had come to town but he had not yet gone out, so he had not come to see me. His cheeks were fallen in and his eyes sunken in their sockets. “Only think,” said Schutzling, “for twenty years I did not see you, and when I saw you it turned out that I should see you again. Come here, my friend, and let me kiss you.” And while he was embracing and kissing me, I was afraid, for some reason, that he might suddenly smile.

Meanwhile he looked at his sister and said, “She has fallen asleep again. I’ll tell you how it happened. That was a very strange day. Whatever I tried to do didn’t succeed. I said to myself: Let me go about my business. I went into a certain office where I buy my merchandise, and my heart was sad, my friend, infinitely sad. Suddenly a shot was heard. It startled me; I got up and asked, ‘What sound was that I heard?’ Before anyone answered, a second shot was heard, and a third. I pressed my hand to my heart and ran into the street. I met two men and asked them, ‘Where did those shots come from?’ But they said, ‘We don’t know.’ I said to myself: Why do they say they don’t know? — and asked two others. Or perhaps I didn’t ask them, for in a moment they had vanished. I met three men I knew and asked them. Their faces were white as chalk. They pointed to one side and said that the shots came from there. ‘Isn’t that the direction of the prison?’ ‘Perhaps,’ said they, and tried to slip away. I shouted, ‘Tell me who was shooting and who they were shooting at?’ ‘It seems that there was a stray bullet,’ replied one of them. ‘Tell me what you know,’ I said to him. ‘A prisoner has escaped from prison,’ he stammered, ‘and was shot.’ ‘A man or a woman?’ I asked. Their eyes streamed with tears and they nodded their heads. I went up to my office and took my hat, then I ran to the prison and found out what happened.”

The old woman awoke and said, “Aaron, do you want to go to see your friend off? If so, go and come back right away.” I beckoned to him to sit still. “Wait a little while,” said Genendel, “I want to ask you something. A few years ago a Jew came from the Land of Israel and sold me some earth from the Land. If I show you the earth will you recognize whether it came from there? That Jew was the emissary of a certain society they call ‘Midnight,’ because they get up at midnight to bewail the destruction of the Temple, and he had a box full of earth from various places, arranged like a kind of pharmacy. What do you think, should I believe he brought the earth from the Land of Israel, or perhaps he took it from a rat’s hole?” “Well,” I replied, “there is a Land of Israel, and in the Land of Israel there is earth, and that Jew you spoke of came from the Land of Israel, so why should you not believe that he brought the earth from there?” “If I have the choice of not believing him, why should I believe him?” said Genendel. “So why did you buy it from him?” ‘That’s a great question you ask,” said Genendel. “Why did I buy? If a person knew in advance what he was doing, the world would be a real paradise.”

On my way out, I went in to speak to Leibtche Bodenhaus. His room was small and neat, with a table, a bed and a chair, a little lamp, and a picture of Moses our Teacher hanging on the wall, with two tablets in his hand inscribed with the numbers from one to ten in Roman figures and two majestic horns issuing from his head. There were two books open on the table: one the Pentateuch, and the other — not to be mentioned in the same breath — the poems of Schiller; also some blue ink, and three pens, and a little ruler, with copybooks and notebooks lying beside them, neat and clean. A room so neat and fine you could not find in the whole town.