— Yes, tormentedly in love…
— You.
— With a young woman — someone like — well, like…
— Ah!
— A devastating love that would make you leave everything — the estate — all of us — to follow your beloved to the —
— No.
— Well, then…
— What?
— Ah…
— You?
— You are jok —
— Then why don’t you, dearest Papa? Yes, why don’t you fall in love a bit, ha ha…
— That is so. What really do I know about you?
— I can only tell you what I think.
— That may be…
— What does anyone know about anyone?
— Hardly a thing
— Two children — little ones — at my age he was even more of a confirmed bachelor than I am…
— Of course he had a wife.
— I will get to her.
— I will get to her… don’t be so impatient…
— Haven’t I told you? Mani.
— Moshe.
— It is a common enough name in the Orient.
— Oh, he was Manic indeed… just wait until you hear it all…
— Yes, the whole story — and nothing but the whole story — but please let me tell it in my own good time — it is a balm for my weary soul. Please let… I feel suddenly gripped by such sorrow over his death!
— I am not shouting… forgive me. Anyhow, there we were in that empty, desolate street, circling round to the front of the Casino. By now he was telling me all about Jerusalem and his clinic, which he had come to Europe to raise funds for because he wished to expand and modernize it. Mind you, I was listening with half an ear, because Linka, I was alarmed to see, was not at all where I had left her. The nearby streets were silent except for a dimly lit tavern here and there in which — when I peered into them — I saw nothing but red-faced, drunken Swiss speaking sadly to themselves. I could have killed myself for leaving her! Where could all our Jews have disappeared to? And meanwhile this Mani kept tagging after me, so excited to have found out that I was a pediatrician that he could not stop talking for a second — about his Swedish nurse who was an expert in painless births and about some new idea of his for building up the blood of postnatal jaundice cases — three of his own infants, so he told me, had died of jaundice themselves — while I simply kept nodding at everything he said, listening as though in a dream. Talk of fright! I could not help thinking of all kinds of things that a person has no business imagining…
— That she had been carried off… that she had been misused…
— I don’t know. Nor does it matter. I was very frightened. Linka and I had never been so far away from home, and by now I saw that there was no hope of finding her in those empty streets — and so I asked Mani to excuse me, because I was in a hurry to get to my boardinghouse, and I told him about my vanished sister, Well, at once he stopped his chatter and offered to drive me to my lodgings in his hansom — first the man had a candle in his pocket, now he had a hansom up his sleeve! He led me to a little back street — and there, Father, was parked a real carriage with a fancy black top and a coachman in red livery, a big-bearded fellow slumped sleeping on his seat. It was, it turned out, the gift of some Jewish banker in Zurich, who had refused to give Mani a donation for his clinic but had agreed to put a vehicle at his disposal to help him put the touch on other Jews. I can still see it, Father, standing in the dead of night on a street corner not far from the Casino with a black, thoroughbred, high-legged horse that looked straight out of the Alps — it had the glitter of the moon in its big eyes! And it was starting there — from the moment I climbed into that carriage — that a straight line — I see it as though in a vision — ran straight to his death… to that hideous tragedy… although the truth, I tell you, is that we were only a pretext…
— Because it is not conceivable that the seed of it was not already there, if only as a dry kernel that lies in the earth without knowing that it is a seed…
— No, Papa, no. I said I would tell everything in order.
— If I am being obstinate, it is only to keep you from leaving me here by this stove in the middle of the night once you have heard the end of my story. Because only the suspense can overcome your tiredness — can bring you to our boardinghouse in that wonderful hansom through the pleasantly cool Basel night — our horse clip-clopping briskly over cobblestones — up and down streets whose inhabitants were already enjoying a well-earned sleep. I still had no idea where all our Jews had gone off to, especially the younger ones; they could not have all gone to bed already. But soon we reached the boardinghouse, which was entirely dark — her window too, which made my heart sink, because that meant she had not come back. I was so afraid of the carriage driving off and leaving me a nervous wreck in the sleeping boardinghouse that I implored my Dr. Mani — who had by now finished telling me that he was born in Jerusalem to a mother who was born there too — to stay and keep me company. Not that he needed much imploring. He was only too happy to oblige. Perhaps he craved human contact after the indignity inflicted on him by Herzl. I burst into the lobby; shook the old grandfather of a concierge who was sleeping on a cot in the dining room beneath some gleaming copper pans on the wall — like red little suns they were, glinting in the night light; snatched the keys from his hand; and flew off to her room. It was exactly as she had left it — exactly as she leaves her room at home — her dresses everywhere — her underwear all over the floor. I felt knifed by anxiety. All evening I had gone about with the knowledge that it was her first day — not the best time for her to be gallivanting around…
— No. Of her menses.
— I knew. I always know. It does not matter. I —
— I have always known since she was a girl. Since her first time…
— Don’t ask me how. I know it — I feel it — I–I don’t know how but I do…
— No. Never mind that, though. This is not her story but rather —
— No, she is not. He is — that wandering obstetric fund-raiser — that Dr. Mani — who sat there with me in the dining room, facing a little oil lamp that old gramps had lit for us, already preparing for his doom — cozying up to his pretext — because that — although why us? why us? — is all we ever were for him. The more anxious for Linka I became, the more he sympathized. He was falling in love with her before he had even seen her — he did not have to see her. And I was beginning to detect a certain oriental softness in him — a rather pariah-like patience — coupled with an ancient and obscure grievance — together with a knack for latching onto you and quickly putting himself in your shoes. He was still carrying on about his clinic and his attempt to raise funds for it. I could see that he wished to take my measure — perhaps as a financial or medical partner — because the minute I told him about our estate, he grew quite ecstatic over his good fortune at having run into not only a Zionist pediatrician, but a rich Zionist pediatrician in the bargain…
— As we were driving in the hansom. I believe I expressed my pleasure at the horse’s light gait and compared it to our own heavy drays that Mrazhik can never get to shake a leg…
— From there it was but a step to the flour mills and the forest. He listened openmouthed, as if trying to gulp it all down.
— No, I told him some medical tales too. About deliveries in the villages. How the Jewesses scream and the Poles sob…
— But they do. Every last one of them.
— You never asked.
— They positively bawl, every one of them.