S. Agnon - Shira

Herbst surveyed his world and saw that all was well. It had always seemed to him that there was an open pit at his feet, a raging surf about to sweep over him. Between yesterday and today, the pit was covered; the surf subsided. The books that had been stacked on his desk were back in place; what he had intended to copy was copied. The copied material was organized and sorted, as were his writing pads, as were his notebooks. As soon as he sat down to work on his book, the notes were going to leap into his hands and offer themselves to him. Herbst had enough material to begin writing the book, but his ideas had so many ramifications that he wasn’t sure they would lead to the conclusion he had had in mind at the beginning, before he started collecting material.

Let’s have a look at the rest of Herbst’s affairs.

His little daughter Sarah is growing up, and she is no trouble to her parents. Her teeth grew in like a mouse’s without causing her parents a single sleepless night. She caught the standard childhood illnesses and made short shrift of them. She was never really sick and didn’t need doctors. Whenever Henrietta saw that Sarah wasn’t well, she called the doctor, but, by the time he arrived, she would be all better. But what will we do when it’s time for her to start school? Here in Baka, which is an Arab neighborhood, there is no Jewish kindergarten. During the 1929 riots, all the Jews fled for their lives and didn’t return, except for the Herbst family. We’ll have to take the child to Talpiot, but how will we manage to get her from Baka to Talpiot and from Talpiot to Baka? We’ll have no choice but to move to a Jewish neighborhood. It would surely be nice to live among Jews, but how is one to give up the vegetable garden and the flower garden, in which Henrietta has invested so much effort all these years? Manfred says to her, “Don’t fret. We can get vegetables from the market, and there are flower vendors in the city from whom you’ll be able to buy whatever you like.”

So much for the vegetable garden and the flower garden; let’s turn our attention to the houses in the city. Two or three generations back, there was space between the buildings. Each one stood alone. Now they are crowded together on rocky terrain that produces no trees, no shrubs, no grass — only noise and clamor. New neighborhoods have been built, too. They have no trees yet, but saplings have been planted, which will grow into sturdy trees. Talpiot is the neighborhood closest to ours, so close to Baka that one bus serves them both. But I can tell you this: in Talpiot, the houses are small, with tiny rooms. The roads are in disrepair, and Arabs from nearby villages pass through, noisy and raucous, littering the street with food and animal dung. Its streets have no benches to sit on, not even trees in whose shade one could rest. True, there is a grove, but every tree in the grove is claimed by a British soldier and his slut, transacting their business while children watch, laugh, and make obscene comments. Jerusalem’s schoolchildren are brought to this grove to plant trees on Arbor Day. They set forth with great fanfare, bedecked with branches torn from trees that have just begun to grow, and carry scores of saplings, which they stick into the ground as they sing about the land. The next day, no one remembers the tender saplings, except the Arabs, who uproot them and use them to build cooking fires. What remains of that tree-planting celebration? Dozens of articles about the Jewish National Fund and the teachers who are engaged in reclaiming the land.

From the youngest of the girls, I move on to her big sister Tamara. Sarah is not yet of kindergarten age; Tamara is about to be rid of school or is, perhaps, already rid of it. We will now sing the praises of Tamara. Her tongue has lost its sting. She is no longer insolent to her father. She doesn’t call him by his name; she calls him “Father.” And she doesn’t say to him, “So, Manfred, you’ve made us a sister,” as she did after Sarah was born. Furthermore, she doesn’t malign her teachers, deride our great poets, or make silly remarks about Apollo bound up in tefillin straps. She has even changed her mind about Jewish history. She says many negative things about the British — that they have taken over the country, that it’s time for them to fold their tents and go. Some people are offended by her opinions; others nod in agreement. One can’t deny that there is a grain of truth in what she says. Even if we were to overlook the hardships imposed on us by Mandate officials, we must denounce them for shedding the blood of our brothers before our very eyes. Oppressed and tortured, escaping the Nazi sword aboard battered vessels that cast about for days, weeks, months on end, they finally reach the waters of the Land of Israel, only to be confronted by Mandate police brandishing rifles, barring them from the country, though it is open to Poles and to every other nation. The people that concluded an eternal covenant with this land is excluded from it.

So much for adversity; now we’ll tell a little bit about Tamara’s other affairs. She engages in volunteer work and does not earn enough to keep her shoes in repair. In any case, it’s good that she doesn’t interfere in the household routines. One might say she pitches in. We wouldn’t be aware of this if we hadn’t heard about it from her father, who said, “I’m grateful to you, my dear, for taking my letters to the post office.”

I’ll mention Firadeus too. Though she doesn’t count as part of the household, she counts because of the housework. She arrives in the morning and leaves in the afternoon. If, for some reason, she doesn’t come — because of the curfew, the perils of the road, or some other life-threatening situation — she doubles her efforts the next day and makes up what she has missed. On her own, she looks for and finds all sorts of tasks that never occurred to the lady of the house, whose grip on the household has relaxed, due to the stress of pregnancy, so that she no longer keeps her customary vigilant eye on things. This being the case, Firadeus does her best to spare Mrs. Herbst. Firadeus is devoted to Mrs. Herbst and to Mr. Herbst, too, because they are fine people. There are other fine people: Mr. Sacharson, for example, who pays her generously for putting wrappers on his pamphlets, even the ones her neighbors take and don’t return. When he sees her looking sad, for someone might suspect she took money for them, he laughs and says, “Silly girl, don’t worry. No need to get upset.” Still, she doubts that he is really a good man, for there is something about his laugh that isn’t right; the mockery in his eyes and his distorted face are signs that something isn’t right. The Herbsts are different. They are good and lovable. Firadeus once tried to describe what was so special about the Herbsts to her friends, but she failed. Her friends said to her, “Even you don’t know.” Firadeus knows that she knows, but she doesn’t know how to explain it to anyone else.

I have said so much about seemingly trivial matters that are not actually trivial, for they shed light on the people Herbst lived with. If I weren’t afraid to be too abstract, I would say that all the household winds were at one with the man of the house.

Herbst sits at home. He doesn’t go to Shira’s, so, obviously, he doesn’t stay there late. But he is at his desk late, with his books and his papers. Some of the papers are in the new box that was made for him; others are on the desk in front of him, so he can jot down ideas that will enhance his book. He is about to turn out a new book, a sequel to the first one. A true researcher — even if he turns out many books, each one brimming with new and different ideas — will relate them all to his very first book, the one that took shape in his mind when he first began to respond to intellectual stimulation, before he even knew why he was responding.