S. Agnon - A Book that Was Lost

Afterward, while standing under the bridal canopy, I recalled the story of a man whose mistress forced him to marry her. He went and gathered for the ceremony all her lovers who had lived with her before her marriage, both to remind her of her shame and to punish himself for agreeing to marry such a woman. What a contemptible fellow and what a contemptible act! Yet I found that man to my liking, and I thought well of what he had done. And when the rabbi stood and read the marriage contract, I looked at the wedding guests and tried to imagine what the woman was like and what her lovers were like at that moment. And in the same way, just before, when my wife put out her finger for the wedding ring and I said to her, “Behold thou art consecrated unto me,” I knew without anyone’s telling me what that man was like at that moment.

6

After the wedding we left for a certain village to spend our honeymoon. I won’t tell you everything that happened to us on the way and in the station and on the train; and, accordingly, I won’t describe every mountain and hill we saw, nor the brooks and springs in the valleys and mountains, as tellers of tales are accustomed to do when they set about describing the trip of a bride and groom. Undoubtedly there were mountains and hills and springs and brooks, and several things did happen to us on the way, but everything else has escaped me and been forgotten because of one incident which occurred on the first night. If you’re not tired yet, I’ll tell you about it.

We arrived at the village and registered at a little hotel situated among gardens and surrounded by mountains and rivers. We had supper and went up to the room that the hotel had set aside for us, for I had telegraphed our reservation before the wedding. Examining the room, my wife let her eyes dwell on the red roses that had been put there. “Who was so nice,” I said jokingly, “to send us these lovely roses?” “Who?” asked my wife with genuine wonder, as though she thought there were someone here besides the hotel people who knew about us. “In any case,” I said, “I’m taking them away, because their fragrance will make it hard to sleep. Or perhaps we should leave them in honor of the occasion.” “Oh, yes,” my wife answered after me in the voice of a person who speaks without hearing his own words. I said to her, “And don’t you want to smell them?”—“Oh, yes, I want to.” But she forgot to smell them. This forgetfulness was strange for Dinah, who loved flowers so much. I reminded her that she hadn’t yet smelled the flowers. She bent her head over them. “Why are you bending down,” I asked her, “when you can hold them up to you?” She looked at me as though she had just heard something novel. The blue-black in her eyes darkened, and she said, “You are very observant, my darling.” I gave her a long kiss; then with closed eyes I said to her, “Now, Dinah, we are alone.”

She stood up and took off her clothes with great deliberation, and began to fix her hair. As she was doing that, she sat down, bending her head over the table. I leaned over to see why she was taking so long, and I saw that she was reading a little pamphlet of the kind one finds in Catholic villages. The title was Wait for Your Lord in Every Hour That He May Come .

I took her chin in my hand and said to her, “You don’t have to wait, your lord has already come,” and I pressed my mouth against hers. She lifted her eyes sadly and laid the pamphlet aside. I took her in my arms, put her in bed, and turned the lamp wick down.

The flowers gave off their fragrance and a sweet stillness surrounded me. Suddenly I heard the sound of footsteps in the room next to ours. I forced the sound out of my mind and refused to pay attention to it, for what difference did it make to me whether or not there was someone there. I didn’t know him and he didn’t know us. And if he did know us, we had a wedding and were properly married. I embraced my wife with great love and was happy beyond limit with her, for I knew she was entirely mine.

With Dinah still in my arms, I strained attentively to make out whether that fellow’s footsteps had stopped, but I heard him still pacing back and forth. His footsteps drove me to distraction: a strange idea now occurred to me, that this was the clerk my wife had known before her marriage. I was horror-stricken at the thought, and I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from cursing out loud. My wife took notice.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“I see something’s troubling you.”

“I’ve already told you nothing is.”

“Then I must have been mistaken.”

I lost my head and said to her, “You were not mistaken.”

“What is it, then?”

I told her.

She began to sob.

“Why are you crying?” I said.

She swallowed her tears and answered, “Open the door and the windows and tell the whole world of my depravity.”

I was ashamed of what I had said, and I tried to mollify her. She listened to me and we made peace.

7

From then on that man was never out of my sight, whether my wife was present or not. If I sat by myself, I thought about him, and if I talked with my wife, I mentioned him. If I saw a flower, I was reminded of the red roses, and if I saw a red rose, I was reminded of him, suspecting that was the kind he used to give my wife. This, then, was the reason she refused to smell the roses on the first night, because she was ashamed in her husband’s presence to smell the same kind of flowers that her lover used to bring her. When she cried, I would console her. But in the kiss of reconciliation I heard the echo of another kiss which someone else had given her. We are enlightened individuals, modern people, we seek freedom for ourselves and for all humanity, and in point of fact we are worse than the most diehard reactionaries.

Thus passed the first year. When I wanted to be happy with my wife, I would remember the one who had spoiled my happiness, and I would sink into gloom. If she was happy, I asked myself, What makes her so happy? She must be thinking of that louse. As soon as I mentioned him to her, she would burst into tears. “What are you crying for?” I would say. “Is it so difficult for you to hear me talk against that louse?”

I knew that she had long since put all thought of him out of her mind, and if she thought of him at all, it was only negatively, for she had never really loved him. It was only his supreme audacity together with a transient moment of weakness in her that had led her to lose control and listen to his demands. But my understanding of the matter brought me no equanimity. I wanted to grasp his nature, what it was in him that had attracted this modest girl raised in a good family.

I began to search through her books in the hope of finding some sort of letter from him, for Dinah was in the habit of using her letters as bookmarks. I found nothing, however. Perhaps, I thought, she has deliberately hidden them somewhere else, inasmuch as I have already searched all her books and found nothing. I could not bring myself to examine her private things. And that made me still angrier, for I was pretending to be decent while my thoughts were contemptible. Since I had spoken with no one else about her past, I sought counsel in books and began to read love stories in order to understand the nature of women and their lovers. But the novels bored me, so I took to reading criminal documents. My friends noticed and jokingly asked me if I were planning to join the detective squad.

The second year brought no mitigation or relief. If a day passed without my mentioning him, I spoke about him twice as much on the following day. From all the anguish I caused her, my wife fell sick. I healed her with medicines and battered her heart with words. I would tell her, “All your illness comes to you only because of the man who ruined your life. Right now he’s playing around with other women, and me he has left with an invalid wife to take care of.” A thousand kinds of remorse would sting me for every single word, and a thousand times I repeated those words.