— The Jewesses? As loud as they can. It is to make sure the baby hears them and remembers to be nice to its mother after all it has put her through. But the Poles sob. The devil only knows why — perhaps, ha ha, it’s for shame at having brought another Polack into the world…
— Idle chitchat, yes. But what was I to do? I was swamped by anxiety, and Mani was the straw I clutched at to take my mind off it. And he did seem a cordial and charming fellow, busily fusing himself to his pretext while the mountains turned purple outside…
— Yes, I am back to pretexts. You will have to put up with it, dearest Papa. That is the word and I had better stick to it if I ever mean to get any sleep…
— No, not yet. Because just then I heard her laughter in the quiet street, a laughter that had a new note in it. It sounded like some ticklish little carnivore’s. A minute later she walked in with a new escort — no longer the children of pogroms and Pobedonostsev but three middle-aged pans, two from Lvov and one from Warsaw — a half anti-Semitic, pro-Zionist Pole who had been sent by the latest right-wing newspaper to find out if there was any truth to the rumors that the Jews were indeed thinking of packing their bags…
— Narojd Ojcizna.
— That is a tune we are going to hear more and more of. An insolent clown of a fellow he was, slightly tipsy. He bowed extravagantly to me and took the slyest liberties with all of us, and especially with Linka, draping his white cape over her bare shoulders — and not for modesty’s sake, I assure you, but to hide the stains she had gotten on her dress in some tavern. She was quite flushed — her dress was creased — her hair was wild. She seemed flustered too by all that gross male gallantry — but believe me, Father, she was enjoying it. At once she began to throw on the table packs of cigarettes, resolutions, pamphlets, reports, manifestos — the whole cornucopia of documents we delegates had been crammed with — and then flung herself at me like a whirling dervish. How could I have gone and left her like that? Why, she had had to put these charming gentlemen to the inconvenience of searching all over for me! I clenched my fists, utterly humiliated. I almost hit her, Father. From the moment I heard that laughter of hers ring out in the night, I wanted to thrash her — I, for whom such a thought…
— You know I have never lifted a hand against anyone. But now I scarcely could control myself — I wanted to thrash her, plain and simple — I, who had never touched her in anger, not even when she was a little brat — not even when you went off to Vilna for Grandmother’s funeral and left me with her for two weeks. In no time we were quarreling in front of everyone, right in the middle of that sleeping boardinghouse — even old gramps, who must have smelled the liquor on the breath of that Zionist goy, came tiptoeing over for a look…
— Everything. Don’t ask. Everything! And most of all, that outlandish white shawl on her shoulders, draped over that most scandalous dress, which I destroyed the next day. All at once she had become the grand lady. You should have seen her holding her hand out for those Poles to kiss — that childish little hand stained with ink, which her admirer from Warsaw put his lips to with unconcealed desire — she was laughing, she was all in a whirl — a once neatly closed little pocket knife that had suddenly sprung open with all its blades…
— No, no, don’t say anything. I was not looking to make a scene. And in any case, at that very moment Mani appeared from his dark corner, stepping out from beneath the burnished copper pans, and I presented him, embarrassed as he was — my pudgy jack-in-the-box — my antithesis — to everyone. “Straight from Jerusalem, gentlemen,” I said furiously, “from Jerusalem itself!” You could actually feel that mysterious city blow through the room like a fresh breeze. The Polish pans grinned — Jerusalem? — you can’t be serious! — while Linka turned to my antithesis with a warm glance. She held out her hand to him and he kissed it (it was then I first noticed that he had a special, an endearing way with women) most nobly and shyly. “He speaks English,” I told her. “You can speak in English to him.” And so she did, without the slightest hesitation — a soft, musical English it was too, like a sweet oatmeal porridge — to which — amazed but appreciative — he replied in that peacock talk of his, the language of the future, as he called it. The Polish gentlemen stood by grinning like idiots, and old gramps wanted to know what it was about us Jews that made us speak four different languages in as many minutes. And it was then, dearest Papa — or at least so I remember it — that I was so seized by the desire to travel to Palestine with that man that I made up my mind to give our Linka a taste of the real thing — to chuck her into the dark bosom of Zionism itself. Jerusalem? Then let it be Jerusalem!
— Let it be Jerusalem!
— Yes, and the sooner the better. I could not wait to be off, if only to get all those pans and their ilk off her trail. And just then I thought of you, Papa, and I felt my gorge rise…
— Because I knew you would never understand and would say no.
— In plain language, that you would not allow us to go.
— Well, it did have to do with you… or so I thought…
— But if we had asked permission, you would not have given it…
— No objection? But just look at yourself now…
— It’s a fact. You are furious. You are…
— What?
— You were not angry?
— I don’t follow you.
— My imagination?
— What?
— No. Where —
— You were glad? But how come? For what reason?
— Proud? How odd… proud! You truly felt that?
— Truly? And to think that when we cabled you from the post office in Venice before boarding ship, I was shaking like a criminal…
— Then Linka was right. I misjudged you… Linka knew better than I did…
—“Papa will only go through the motions… in his heart he’ll be on our side…” But how —
— Still…
— That was all.
— I was wrong — I never thought — I am quite bowled over. Dear, dearest Papa, forgive me! And here I had already decanted your anger into me — I have gone about all this time with your accusing glance boring into me from behind — I have asked myself, “How could you have done this to Papa and Mama and gone chasing camels and donkeys in the desert when you should have been finding yourself a wife in Frau Lippmann’s boardinghouse…?”
— The congress? It was the Third Zionist Congress, Father. There will undoubtedly be a fourth one too…
— I mean… but was it not fully written up in Der Ytd? The fact is, Father, that my mind was not entirely on the congress.
— A great deal of talk. Of speech-making. Of debate. Even our Dr. Mani delivered a little oration to the “Medical Committee” in which he asked for help and invited all the doctors to be his guests in Jerusalem. Why don’t you ask Linka? She can tell you what made the fur fly and what was decided when it settled, because she sat through it all faithfully and did not miss a single session. You should have seen her in her embroidered peasant’s dress — I had already gotten rid of that outrageous black décolleté—taking everything terribly seriously and even keeping notes — a most loyal and responsible delegate from an imaginary constituency. But what constituency was not imaginary? Was Moscow polled on its delegates or Warsaw asked about its? The fact is that I was rarely at the sessions because I was already secretly planning our journey to Palestine. I acted quite clandestinely, Papa. I did not breathe a word to Linka or to Dr. Mani, who had let slip the name of his ship, which was sailing from Venice to Jaffa on the first of September. I believe he had a sixth sense of it, though. He took to following us around, sitting with Linka whenever he could and speaking to her in the language of the future. But my thoughts just then were not of them. They were only of you…