S. Agnon - Two Scholars Who Were in our Town and other Novellas

As I stood up to go, the mistress of the house entered and said to her husband, You have forgotten your promise. He was much perturbed at this, and said: Wonder of wonders; all the time I have known Tehilla she has never asked a favor. And now she wants me to say that she wishes to see you.

Are you speaking, said I, of Tilli, the old woman who showed me the way to your house? For it seems that you call her by another name.

Tehilla, he answered, is Tilli’s holy, Hebrew name. From this you may learn that, even four or five generations ago, our forbears would give their daughters names that sound as though they had been recently coined. For this reason my wife’s name is Tehiya, meaning Rebirth, which one might suppose to have been devised in our own age of rebirth. Yet in fact it belongs to the time of the great Rebbe Yitzhak Meir Alter, author of the Hiddushei HaRim , who instructed my wife’s great-grandfather to call his daughter Tehiya; and my wife is named after her.

I said: You speak now of the custom four or five generations ago. Can it be that this Tehilla is so old?

He smiled, saying: Her years are not written upon her face, and she is not in the habit of telling her age. We only know it because of what she once let slip. It happened that Tehilla came to congratulate us at the wedding of our son; and the blessing she gave to our son and his bride was that it might be granted for them to live to her age. My son asked, “What is this blessing with which you have blessed us?” And she answered him: “It is ninety years since I was eleven years old.” This happened three years ago; so that now her age is, as she might express it, ninety years and fourteen: that is to say, a hundred and four.

I asked him, since he was already speaking of her, to tell me what manner of woman she was. He answered:

What is there to say? She is a saint; yes, in the true meaning of the word. And if you have this opportunity of seeing her, you must take it. But I doubt if you will find her at home; for she is either visiting the sick, or bringing comforts to the poor, or doing some other unsolicited mitzva. Yet you may perhaps find her, for between mitzva and mitzva she goes home to knit garments or stockings for poor orphans. In the days when she was rich, she spent her wealth upon deeds of charity, and now that nothing is left her but a meager pittance to pay for her own slender needs, she does her charities in person.

The scholar accompanied me as far as Tehilla’s door. As we walked together he discoursed on his theories; but realizing that I was not attending to his words, he smiled and said, From the moment I spoke of Tehilla, no other thought has entered your mind.

I would beg to know more of her, I replied.

He said: I have already spoken of her as she is today. How she was before she came to our Land I do not know, beyond what everyone knows; that is to say, that she was a very wealthy woman, the owner of vast concerns, who gave up all when her sons and her husband died, and came here to Jerusalem. My late mother used to say, “When I see Tehilla, I know that there is a worse retribution than widowhood and the loss of sons.” What form of retribution this was, my mother never said; and neither I, nor anyone else alive, knows; for all that generation which knew Tehilla abroad is now dead, and Tehilla herself says but little. Even now, when she is beginning to change, and speaks more than she did, it is not of herself. We have come to her house; but it is unlikely that you will find her at home; for towards sunset she makes the round of the schoolrooms, distributing sweets to the younger children.

A few moments later I stood in the home of Tehilla. She was seated at the table, expecting me, so it seemed, with all her being. Her room was small, with the thick stone walls and arched ceiling that were universal in the Jerusalem of bygone days. Had it not been for the little bed in a corner, and a clay jar upon the table, I would have likened her room to a place of worship. Even its few ornaments — the hand-lamp of burnished bronze, and a copper pitcher, and a lamp of the same metal that hung from the ceiling — even these, together with the look of the table, on which were laid a prayer-book, a Bible, and some third book of study, gave to the room the grace and still calm of a house of prayer.

I bowed my head saying, Blessed be my hostess.

She answered: And blessed be my guest.

You live here, said I, like a princess.

Every daughter of Israel, she said, is a princess; and, praised be the living God, I too am a daughter of Israel. It is good that you have come. I asked to see you; and not only to see you, but to speak with you also. Would you consent to do me a favor?

“Even to the half of my kingdom,” I replied.

She said: It is right that you should speak of your kingdom; for every man of Israel is the son of kings, and his deeds are royal deeds. When a man of Israel does good to his neighbor, this is a royal deed. Sit down, my son: it makes conversation easier. Am I not intruding upon your time? You are a busy man, I am sure, and need the whole day for gaining your livelihood. Those times have gone when we had leisure enough and were glad to spend an hour in talk. Now everyone is in constant bustle and haste. People think that if they run fast enough it will speed the coming of Messiah. You see, my son, how I have become a chatterer. I have forgotten the advice of that old man who warned me not to waste words.

I was still waiting to learn the reason for her summons. But now as if she had indeed taken to heart the old man’s warning, she said nothing. After a while she glanced at me, and then looked away; then glanced at me again, as one might who is scrutinizing a messenger to decide whether he is worthy of trust. At last she began to tell me of the death of the rabbanit , who had passed away during the night, while her stove was burning, and her cat lay warming itself at the flame, — till the pall-bearers came, and carried her away, and someone unknown had taken the stove.

You see, my son, said Tehilla, a man performs a mitzva , and one mitzva begets another. Your deed was done for the sake of that poor woman, and now a second person is the gainer, who seeks to warm his bones against the cold. Again she looked me up and down; then she said: I am sure you are surprised that I have troubled you to come.

On the contrary, I said, I am pleased.

If you are pleased, so am I. But my pleasure is at finding a man who will do me a kindness; as for you, I do not know why you should be pleased.

For a moment she was silent. Then she said: I have heard that you are skilful at handling a pen — that you are, as they nowadays call it, a writer. So perhaps you will place your pen at my service for a short letter. For many years I have been wanting to write a letter. If you are willing, write for me this letter.

I took out my fountain-pen. She looked at it with interest, and said: You carry your pen about with you, like those who carry a spoon wherever they go, so that if they chance upon a meal — well, the spoon is ready at hand.

I replied: For my part, I carry the meal inside the spoon. And I explained to her the working of my fountain-pen.

She picked it up in her hand and objected: You say there is ink inside, but I cannot see one drop.

I explained the principle more fully, and she said: If it is so, they slander your generation in saying that its inventions are only for evil. See, they have invented a portable stove, and invented this new kind of pen: it may happen that they will yet invent more things for the good of mankind. True it is that the longer one lives, the more one sees. All the same, take this quill that I have myself made ready, and dip it in this ink. It is not that I question the usefulness of your pen; but I would have my letter written with my own. And here is a sheet of paper; it is crown-paper, which I have kept from days gone by, when they knew how good paper was made. Upwards of seventy years I have kept it by me, and still it is as good as new. One thing more I would ask of you: I want to write, not in the ordinary cursive hand, but in the square, capital letters of the prayer-book and the Torah scroll. I assume that a writer must at some time have transcribed, if not the Torah itself, at least the scroll of Esther that we read on Purim.