There is a special relationship between Moshe and Herbst. Since their consultation about the books — transporting, organizing, packing them, et cetera — Moshe has remained fond of him, even devoted to him. As soon as he saw Herbst, he approached him and asked if he was now ready to have his books transported. Moshe stationed himself in front of Herbst and stuck his hands back into the ropes on his hip. Herbst realized he was expected to say something to him. Meaning to be polite, he asked him how he was doing. Moshe extricated his right hand, placed it on his heart, and began relating some of the troubles that had befallen him, some of the troubles he had been involved in because of bad luck, some of the troubles he was subjected to as a test, and yet other troubles whose nature was still unclear, for there are troubles that turn out to be for the good. As he listed each and every trouble, Moshe either turned his face to heaven and then closed his eyes or closed his eyes and then turned his face to heaven, saying, “May the Lord have mercy.” It was strange to Herbst that this mighty man was so tormented. And what torments! A chronically ill wife, who, because of her condition, was constantly bearing children only to bury them, bearing and burying, so that, after the last of her children was buried and she didn’t give birth again, they adopted two orphans, a boy and a girl. The boy was one of those children whose parents had died en route from Persia to Jerusalem; the girl was the daughter of a relative who was crushed under a safe he was carrying to a bank. They raised the orphans, indulged them with fine food and clothes, bought them shoes to fit their feet, even toys like those the Ashkenazim buy, making no distinction between the two orphans, though the girl was a relative and the boy was not. Moshe and his wife were contented, and they didn’t ask themselves, “Where are our own children?” It was decided that, when the two orphans grew up and were of age, they would marry each other. The boy suddenly took sick. He recovered, but he was unable to walk, because he had infantile paralysis. They carried him from Jerusalem to Tiberias for the holiday of Rabbi Meir the Miracle Worker, and from Tiberias to Meron on the festival of Lag Ba’omer. He was brought to the cave there and placed next to the resting place of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai. Three wise men were hired to stay with him and recite the Zohar. After they recited the entire Zohar, he was taken back to Jerusalem to be married, so the demons would realize he was no longer a child and it was time to release him from that illness, which was, after all, an illness of childhood. Wedding clothes were ordered for him and for the girl. The girl went outside in her finest dress and new shoes. A vile and loathsome Yemenite saw her. That villain cast a spell on her, and, on the Shabbat of Lamentations — three weeks before the Shabbat of Compassion, when the wedding was to take place — he carried her off to one of the new settlements, where they were married. The boy remained crippled. An elderly divorcée appeared — actually, she was not so old — and said, “I’m willing to marry him.” Moshe’s wife said, “Go marry the Angel of Death.” She had a grudge against her because, when they were both girls, that witch had poured bird bile on her, which arrests childbirth. If she hadn’t washed herself with the urine of a woman giving birth for the first time, she wouldn’t have been able to bear children at all. Even so, all her children had died.
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.
Chapter fifteen
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.