S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

1

It was most curious, Hemdat’s having agreed to give Yael Hayyut literature lessons. Yet since it struck him as being but one more insoluble psychological riddle, he took the moralist’s advice and did not probe what was beyond him. You made a promise? Keep it.

The evening before their first lesson he happened to find out more about her. He had always considered her an empty-headed flirt who never did a day’s work in her life, but now he discovered that she was terribly poor and hard up. She had more than her share of troubles. Although life had treated her well as a girl in Russia, she had not seen a cloudless day since coming to Palestine, and a stocking knitter’s wages were all she could look forward to. Or rather, while she was learning to knit stockings, a wage was far from certain, since she had a bad arm and was not supposed to strain it. As sad as it was to see anyone down on his luck, it was sadder to see a girl from a good family who had to work for a pittance, a princess banished to the spinning wheel.

How unfair he had been. Thank God he could make up for it. He opened his Bible as she opened the door of his room. He would teach her Hebrew. With a knowledge of the language she could be a nursery-school teacher instead of having to knit all her life. He had been providentially chosen to rescue her.

She was hungry, quite simply hungry. Not that she said so. But he could tell from the way she asked for a glass of water that she had not eaten lunch. Hemdat took out bread and wine. Oh, no, Yael said, she did not want anything. Just some water. In the end she took and ate a slice of bread, pecking at it like a bird. Exactly like a bird: that was all she touched. Pizmoni the poet once said that only birds ate aesthetically. Well put, Mr. Pizrmoni!

It was a fine time of his life, the one in which Hemdat tutored Yael Hayyut. The summer was over; the first rains had fallen and the days were no longer blistering deserts for the sun to beat down on. Hemdat liked to spend his afternoons in bed until clouds formed in the west. Beauteous were the evenings in Canaan.

One Wednesday Yael came late. When she arrived, she sat down on the divan instead of on the chair by the table. You could see she did not feel like studying. She looked at Hemdat and said:

“What makes you so quiet? I used to think you were happy, but now that I know you better I can see that you’re not. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Hemdat bowed his head and said nothing.

Once, when he was more of a ladies’ man, Hemdat had liked nothing better than talking about himself. He had had a happy childhood and his stories about it had won many hearts. Now that all this was behind him, however, he preferred silence. He picked up his Bible and sat down with Yael.

She was a good head taller than he was. He had noticed yesterday how this made her bend, and so he propped the Bible on another book for her. Yet though he had meant to be helpful, she now had to arch her neck like a swan. What did Yael’s tutor think he was doing?

Hemdat took a small pillow and placed in on Yael’s chair. “That’s better, much better,” she nodded. After two hours of study she could sit in comfort at last. She gave him a grateful look with her green eyes. Before they could return to their book, he said:

“If you have no objection, it’s dinner time. I’d like to ask you to join me.”

Yael shook her head. “Oh no, thank you.”

“All right,” said Hemdat, putting away the tablecloth he had taken out. “Let’s get on with the lesson.” He was not going to eat without her. In the end she agreed. She did not have much choice.

If you have never met Hemdat, you might as well meet his room. It stood in the dunes of Nevei Tsedek and had many windows: one facing the sea, and one facing the sand that Tel Aviv is now built on, and one facing the railroad tracks in Emek Refaim, and two facing the street. And yet by drawing the green curtains, Hemdat could cut himself off from the world and the bustle of Jaffa. The room had a table spread with green wax paper, which doubled as the desk he wrote his poems at. Next to it stood a small chest full of good things. There were olives, and bread, and oranges, and wine, and you could take whatever you wanted, and whatever you took was washed down with the coffee that Hemdat made on the alcohol stove on top of the chest. Bright beads of flame twinkled around the beaker while it cooked. Yael glanced up at them from her book. Hemdat looked at her and said:

“You can’t say I’m not a good housekeeper.”

Indeed, you could not. He kept house for himself and ate from his own table. He was not one of your room-and-boarders who lounge around gabbing all day and are sitting down to supper before they have risen from lunch. Not Hemdat. He came from a well-to-do, bourgeois home in which a day spent in idleness was a day stolen from its Creator.

Hemdat bent his curly head by the flaming stove. The light lent his face a charming flush. Yael stared dreamily at the picture over the table. Apart from its furniture, Hemdat’s room had a portrait by Rembrandt on the wall, a picture of a bride and a groom. Yael saw her reflection in it. “I do believe,” she smiled, “that I can see myself in the picture. It’s a Rembrandt, isn’t it?”

Hemdat nodded. “So it is. It’s a Rembrandt, and it’s called The Bride and Groom .”

Hemdat’s room had no mirror except for the glass frame of the picture. Once, when the fiancée of one of his friends was half in love with him, he had imagined himself as a third person in it. He didn’t have such thoughts any longer. People should be happy with what they had and not crave what belonged to others. Hemdat thought of a friend who once said teasingly:

“You only like Rembrandt because he was a Casanova like yourself.”

Who was that knocking? It was Shoshanna and Mushalam. Hemdat opened the door and said, “Come on in.”

Yael jumped to her feet as if bitten by a snake. “Mr. Hemdat is behaving very oddly,” she said. “He absolutely insisted that I stay for supper. It’s too much for me, really it is.”

She blushed all the way down to her throat and looked away from the table.

Shoshanna and Mushalam had just come back from Petach Tikva, where they had unexpectedly attended their own wedding. What happened was that a cousin of Shoshanna’s had married off his youngest son and decided to make the most of the occasion by marrying off Shoshanna too. She and Mushalam were quite unprepared.

“Mazal tov, mazal tov!” said Hemdat and Yael in one breath. “Mazal tov, mazal tov!” they repeated in loud voices.

Hemdat kept thinking how happy he was for them. Such a story should be written in gold letters on unicorn horn. Shoshanna and Mushalam had come to invite him to their wedding party. Hemdat thanked them kindly but said he was busy. He would gladly come to their golden anniversary. Shoshanna and Mushalam were sorry to hear that but told him in leaving that they loved him anyway.

Yael sat there stunned. Shoshanna’s getting married was a big surprise. Imagine two people, one here and one there, and before you know it they have met somewhere else and are joined for life. They were like the palm tree and the fir tree in the poem by Heine.

Yael was poor at literary comparisons. What did one thing have to do with the other? The tree in Heine’s poem stood yearning at a distance of thousands of miles, while Shoshanna and Mushalam were now a married couple. “Some people,” said Hemdat, gripping the edge of the table, “are under the wedding canopy before they know it and others wait to get there all their lives.”

What had made him say a thing like that? Really, he was beginning to talk nonsense.