S. Agnon - Two Tales - Betrothed & Edo and Enam

IV

In time Jacob left high school for the university. His father’s financial affairs had improved, and he himself could now earn his keep by tutoring. He no longer needed the Consul’s aid, but his affection for the older man still kept the twice-yearly meeting a fixture. When they parted the Consul would take out his pocket book, note down the next date and time, and remark, ‘So, in another six months! However, you must telephone my office beforehand.” Lest that should sound like a veiled intention to put Jacob off, he would pause, add the months up, and conclude, “Well, in another half-year!”

Once, when Rechnitz telephoned on the prearranged day, he was told that the Consul was engaged and would not be available. Instead, he was asked to call a day or two later. Next day, when he was teaching one of his pupils, the boy’s father asked Jacob to repeat the name of the consul he had once mentioned in conversation, and then showed Jacob a newspaper, pointing to an obituary notice. “Tomorrow,” he added, “you will be going to the funeral of the Consul’s wife.”

All that night Jacob Rechnitz lay awake. Days that had gone now stood before him, days in and out of the Consul’s house, when the Consul’s wife had shown him so much kindness, in her ways and in her words. Jacob’s mother, too, had loved him as a mother should love her son, and he had returned her love in a son’s normal way; but his affection for Frau Gertrude Ehrlich was something apart. It was a love that could be accounted for by no natural cause, though there was reason for it, no doubt, as there is reason for all things; yet the reason was forgotten, the cause was lost and only the effect remained. He had known, indeed, that Frau Ehrlich was an invalid, and this had troubled and saddened him; but never had he been so grieved as on that night, in his awareness of her death. Shoshanah was now orphaned of her mother. That Shoshanah’s mother was dead, that she herself was an orphan, did not evoke in him any feeling of pity; it was rather like a new motion of the soul, when the soul attaches itself at once to one who is absent and another who is present, and is taken up into both as one.

Before daybreak Jacob Rechnitz had risen and made his way to the cemetery. In the press of his nighttime thoughts Jacob was sure that he had missed the funeral, though if he hurried he might yet arrive in time to see the last of the actual burial. The cemetery gates were open and he could hear the sound of digging among the graves. He ran forward between the trees and the tombstones in the direction of the sound. Two men were at work, standing up to their waists in the earth; a third was pacing out the length of the grave. When the diggers noticed Rechnitz, they looked up. “Do you want to see if it fits you?” they asked, indicating with their spades that he was free to step into the grave. Rechnitz did not understand them and did not move. The man pacing out the grave asked him what he had come for. Rechnitz looked at him in amazement: how could he ask such a question! When at last he realized that Frau Ehrlich’s body still lay in the house, it was almost as if he had heard good news. Though she was dead, she was at least above ground.

Before the entrance to the Ehrlichs’ villa men and women stood in silence. There are times and places when the tongue is tied even in company. Jacob’s mother stroked his cheek and wiped away a tear; his father pressed his foot into the ground as though testing for a foundation. Suddenly the gates opened and men in black mourning clothes brought out the bier, laying it in a black hearse to which four black horses were harnessed. The scent of flowers floated across from the wreaths on and about the bier. The sound of muffled weeping mingled with the scent; an old servant had covered her mouth with a handkerchief so as not to be heard. While the hearse was being made ready for the journey, Shoshanah and her father came out. Shoshanah wore black, with a black veil over her face, her arm in her father’s arm. Both walked as if set apart from this world. Involuntarily, Jacob took a step forward that she might see him, but then as quickly stepped back. Along that funeral way Shoshanah did not once raise her eyes from her mother’s bier. And since the bereaved had requested in newspaper notices that there should be no condolence visits, Jacob sent a letter of condolence instead.

V

As we have said, Jacob Rechnitz set out for the Land of Israel, financed in part by the prize he had won from the university, in part by the Consul’s aid; for when his course was completed and his doctorate granted, Ehrlich invited him to dine out in celebration, and presented him with a sum of money which saved him from the immediate necessity of seeking a post. The gift was made to seem not a matter of financial aid but rather a token of affection and esteem. It was in keeping with all that the Consul had done for him, and touched him so deeply that a refusal was out of the question. Rechnitz put the two sums together, and joined a party traveling to the Land of Israel; there he found work as a schoolteacher, and settled in Jaffa.

He did not forget his benefactor. Twice a year, at the Jewish and the Christian New Year, Rechnitz sent greetings to the Consul. And when his first article was published, he sent him a reprint. But he never wrote to Shoshanah, for the things that had bound them in childhood no longer counted, now that they were grown.

In brief, Jacob Rechnitz was now teaching at his Jaffa school, shaping the minds of many pupils and playing his part in meetings of teachers and parents. For there were already a few schools which encouraged parents to join in their deliberations, while the teachers in turn were given a chance to have their say in communal affairs. Indeed, when it came to public meetings and discussions, there was not a man in Jaffa who neglected his duty. And yet Rechnitz found time to keep up his special study of marine vegetation, and occasionally to write an article on the subject. There is a time for all, and a season for every desire. All the more so in the days before the Great War, and all the more so in the Land of Israel; for then the days were many times longer than ours, and a man was able to do much more, with hours left over in which to take stock of his world. Ordinary people were tolerably contented, and since they were not obliged to give too much thought to themselves, they had time to spare for other matters.

Rechnitz would frequent the homes of the town intelligentsia, where he was given a warm welcome. If there was a pleasing daughter, that was good; if there were two, better still. There were in fact girls of breath-taking beauty who did not belong to such homes. These, who had come to the country by themselves, without their parents, had set their caps at poets and writers, whereas the daughters of the middle class preferred teachers and scholars, who could make a living by their occupations.

Jacob Rechnitz, as a teacher and scholar, thus came to be acquainted mainly with girls of this type; girls who, like most true daughters of Israel, were graced with good looks and comely bearing and winning ways. Jacob never spoke to them about his work. But he would tell them about other lands and seas, about strange peoples and tribes, their customs and habits, their poetry and myths. So it came to pass that if you heard a girl in Jaffa speaking of Greece and Rome, of Sappho and Medea, you could be sure that she had learned all this from Jacob Rechnitz. Until his arrival, no Jaffa girl had ever heard things of this sort, even though the town was full of men with university degrees who had learned of such matters in their time; for their minds had let it all slip, just as their minds had turned away from what they had studied before that in the yeshivas. But Rechnitz had gained his knowledge in childhood, when the things of the imagination and the works of nature go hand in hand, so that even with the passing of time and the growth of the mind they do not come into conflict. Furthermore, Jacob Rechnitz was a native of Austria, where one is less conscious of the Exile and where one’s thoughts are drawn to happier things; and it is the way of these happier thoughts that they give pleasure not only to oneself but to others.