S. Agnon - Shira

The boy lay in the house, on his mat, with no one to lift him and carry him outside to warm up in the sun. When they came back from Meron, Moshe’s wife was stricken with yet another disease, compounding her ills, so that now she herself had to be tended. This is roughly what Moshe told Herbst. If Moshe’s fellow workers hadn’t come to tell him he was needed to move a piano, Moshe would still be talking. A man’s troubles give him eloquence, and Herbst, who was anxious about the books, would have stood there listening.

It took Herbst half a minute to get where he was going. By the time he got there, he had forgotten about all the delays and was reminded of Ernst Weltfremdt’s book. He peered in the bookstore window and saw the book there, open. Weltfremdt was a lucky man. In these troubled times, when books by Jews were being publicly burned all over Germany, he had found a respected Swiss publisher, who put out a splendid edition of his book. Neither of them will suffer. All over the world, scholars who read German will welcome the book. Even in Germany, scholars will not ignore Weltfremdt’s theories. They will take his book into their homes, if not openly, because of government intimidation, then discreetly. Zealots in the Land of Israel shriek that we ought to do unto Germany as it has done to us — that, just as Germany has issued a ban on Jewish books, so should we ban all German books, without recognizing or realizing that whoever deprives himself of intellectual discourse jeopardizes his own soul.

Herbst stood and studied Ernst Weltfremdt’s book, thinking: What about my own book? In Germany, they probably burned it. And here, in this country? I never once saw it in a bookstore here, and, if I hadn’t contributed it to the National Library and to some of my colleagues, I doubt they would know I wrote a book. Some authors put their books in the parlor, so whoever comes in will see them, and they do the same with offprints. That’s not my way. True, I haven’t produced many books, but I have published a great many articles, and they could be made into a bound volume and placed on the bookshelf. Why haven’t I done this? Why not? Herbstlein, Herbstlein, Herbst said, using Julian Weltfremdt’s language. From the depths of my heart, I wish you get a full professorship.

Manfred Herbst was not like Julian Weltfremdt. Julian Weltfremdt disparaged Ernst Weltfremdt’s scholarship; Herbst did not. Many of Ernst Weltfremdt’s qualities were distasteful to him. Those we might call Prussian were particularly ridiculous in this country, yet he admired Weltfremdt’s research. In every single study he undertook, he came up with something new; if not actually new, then at least illuminating. Now that a new book of his was out, Herbst wanted to see what was in it.

What he wanted to see, he didn’t see. What he didn’t want to see is what he saw. He wanted to see the book, but he saw the author. He wore a summer suit of the whitest white silk. His heavy walking stick — yellowish brown, shiny, and heavily knotted — and his soft gray hat were lying on a stack of music books. Of all the well-dressed people in Jerusalem, Ernst Weltfremdt alone knew that hats are in a class of their own and should not be expected to match the rest of one’s outfit. He was standing next to a skinny, long-legged old man wearing colorful clothes and an altogether festive air. He was the painter who had attracted attention at the artists’ Winter Exhibit with a not very large oil painting: a portrait of Weltfremdt’s grandchild, the son of Professor Weltfremdt’s daughter. Now that the painter had run into the professor in the bookstore, he took the opportunity to convey in words what he hoped to convey in paint. The painter described to the professor, in painterly terms, his own image of the professor holding his little grandson on his lap, with the professor’s hand on the baby’s head. In an even lovelier scene, the baby is on the lap of his grandfather, the professor; they are seated at the professor’s desk; the professor’s book is open; the baby’s little hands are fingering the book, and his angelic eyes are fixed on it. Professor Weltfremdt listened, studying the scene in his mind’s eye as the painter formed it in his imagination. He didn’t interrupt. On the contrary, he gave him every chance to embellish the picture. Influenced by the expression on the professor’s face and by his eloquent silence, the painter took on something of the professor’s expression, looking back at him with visionary eyes. All of a sudden, he stepped back, ever so slightly, turned his head to the left, lowered his eyelids halfway, leaned over, and gazed at the professor with eyes that dismissed what they had previously seen and were enthralled by a new vision.

While the painter was standing with the professor, an old woman who had emigrated from Germany was in the store too, in a corner. She was dressed in faded finery, and her entire presence bespoke onetime splendor. Her mouth was agape, either to express reproach, as she had learned in her former life, or to ask for pity, as she had learned more recently, for she was sorely grieved by the fact that a hat and walking stick had been placed on top of her vocal scores. Her circumstances were such that she was forced to sell them, and she had come to see if a buyer had been found. They used to be kept in her mansion, in an ebony case with hinges, locks, bolts, and pegs made of pure silver. It had been crafted by a skilled artist commissioned by the bishop of Mainz and was originally designed to contain a sacred bone of the Christian saint known as the Miracle Worker of Gaza. The bishop had sent this case, with the bone in it, to one of the German princes as a gift. The case, as well as the bone, remained in the prince’s bedroom and performed many miracles. In time, dissension took its toll, and the ideas of the Reformation prevailed. The bone refused to perform for an unworthy generation. It lay idle and forgotten, until, finally, it vanished. The case was then used for cosmetics and jewelry. Eight generations later, it fell into the hands of a singer famed for her beauty and remarkable voice. In it, she placed a vocal score given to her by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who had been her teacher, as well as letters from Schleiermacher, who had converted her to Christianity. This singer’s grandson had Zionist friends and was attracted to a Jewish girl, whom he married, abandoning his parents’ religion and returning to the religion of his forefathers. His wife gave birth to a daughter, who also became a celebrated singer — the old woman now standing in the corner of the store, noting the ravages of time in the form of a walking stick and a hat deposited on top of a vocal score handwritten by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.

Professor Weltfremdt was engaged in conversation with the painter and didn’t notice that Manfred Herbst had entered the store. But Herbst noticed him and slipped away, so as not to intrude on Weltfremdt and the painter.

Herbst went upstairs to the inner rooms. He inhaled the scent of old books — dust, aging paper, leather, linen — with the added smell of all those generations that had handled the books. He was overcome, like any booklover entering a store full of old books, with an emotion akin to yearning, a yearning that turns into a passion all the books in the world can never satisfy. He closed his eyes, tightening his eyelids so that they pressed down on his cheeks to the point of pain. He groped in his pocket and took out a crushed cigarette that had fallen out of the case. He lit the cigarette, took a puff, and made an effort to collect himself. Little by little, he began to feel more composed, and his anxiety receded. Since he woke up, he hadn’t been as comfortable as he was at that moment. In the presence of these ancient volumes that dominate the heart, he assumed a blank expression, so no one would recognize how much he coveted the book whose price he was asking. Herbst flung the cigarette in the ashtray, took out his case, and offered a cigarette to the clerk who was standing by to serve him. The clerk noticed that the cigarette was brown and longer than most cigarettes in the country. He began to discuss the various types of cigarettes he had smoked, arriving at the subject of wartime smoking. Many times, when he was at the front and couldn’t find a cigarette, he used to wrap grass in newspaper and smoke it. He moved on from newspaper to books. Soldiers used to tear out a page, wrap some grass in it, and make cigarettes. He once saw a soldier tearing up a book to use as toilet paper. He looked and saw that it was a first edition of Schiller’s The Mission of Moses . He scolded him and yelled, “You idiot, how can you be that scornful of our great poet Schiller!” The soldier said, “I thought it was one of those Jew books, written by one of their little rabbis.” Herbst suddenly lost his composure. His face turned pale, and his nerves were on edge. Could it be that, even as he was dealing with those German classics for the sake of their fine bindings, he was losing out on first editions of rare books? Hadn’t it already happened to him once that bibliographers denied the existence of a book even though it was mentioned by its author? Why did they deny its existence? Either because they thought the author was exaggerating or because they were trying to outsmart everyone — to show that they trusted only what they saw with their own eyes. Three hundred years later, the book was discovered here in Jerusalem, by a tourist who acquired it, along with considerable fame, for some paltry sum. The ludicrous, perhaps even tragic, part was that, only an hour before, it had been in Herbst’s hand. Why hadn’t he bought it? Because he had never opened it. Why hadn’t he opened it? Because it was bound with another book whose title was displayed on the cover. He, however, knew very well that the volume was too thick for its title, and he should have realized that there must be another book in the same binding. Nine years had passed, but there was hardly a day when he didn’t think about that event. It remained unresolved in his mind, like a wound that doesn’t heal. He took out another cigarette and reviewed the entire incident: how he himself brought the tourist to the bookstore, how he led him to the special room rare books were kept in, how he praised this man to the owner and arranged to have the clerks show him all their treasures. And, finally, it happened — a book that he himself had been holding only an hour earlier fell into another’s hands, making Herbst’s loss his gain. Herbst was not a grudging person, nor did he make a pretense of friendship. It is no exaggeration to say that, among the scholars we know, there are few as generous as Herbst, as ready to enjoy a colleague’s success. Nevertheless, he remained haunted by the saga of that book.