Shira

Father Herbst sits eating what his daughter serves him, straining to ward off suspicious thoughts. In the good days, before he knew Shira, he wouldn’t have entertained even the trace of a suspicion. Father Herbst raises his head so he can look at his daughter and lowers it without looking at her. He raises it again as if to say, “Go to bed, my child, you must be tired.” He also wants to ask for news of Ahinoam. The words are formed and need only to be uttered. A cough disperses them. Father Manfred lowers his head again and eats without tasting the food. Shame and regret are a harsh condiment.

Chapter twenty-four

In the morning, Herbst made a firm decision to clear his mind of all unessential business and devote himself to his major work, to check his pads, notebooks, and file cards, and determine what was new material — i.e., quotations and summaries distilled from documents unnoticed by other researchers. Caution is crucial to scholarship, and careful verification is crucial to caution. Not once, but constantly, for without frequent verification, material already presented by others could be copied into your book. Many times Wechsler had boasted to him that he had discovered a document no one had seen before; a simple document, one would assume. But not so. Were he to publish it, it would fly in the face of all our historians and reveal that they were, one and all, a band of illiterates. Herbst showed him half a dozen books citing that very document and basing theories on it; finally, he showed him a small volume that dismissed it with a curt phrase from which its fraudulence was obvious.

After eating and drinking, he returned to his study. He took out his pads, his notes, his index cards. Though his notebooks were full, with writing on both sides of the paper, and the box was stuffed with cards, he wasn’t arrogant, like those who presume that their book is done if they have enough notes.

Herbst sat at his desk for about two hours, arranging notes by subject, discarding duplicates and triplicates, for sometimes one sees an item and imagines it is new, not remembering he has already copied it two, three, four times. Although he found several new items in his notes, he didn’t delude himself into thinking he had achieved his goal. Nor did he err in the direction of despair, like those who feel helpless when they see they have failed to achieve their goal and say, “Why struggle, when it’s clear I’ll never finish?” One should know that every beginning has an end. Day after day, one does what he does, until finally the beginnings add up to a conclusion.

There were several articles that were similar in subject and in good shape. If he had retained his youthful vigor, he would not have stirred before finding additional material and combining the fragments into a book. But Herbst’s youth was over. This was not the Herbst who used to work so diligently that nothing could distract him. Now some frivolous woman could appear, disrupt him, and turn him on end.

Now that he was thinking of that woman, he began to scrutinize her actions. She sometimes sought distance, sometimes closeness, behaving at times as if there had never been anything between them. If she had allowed him to approach her yesterday, it was only after many rejections. Herbst leaned his head to the left, pondering: Maybe I myself am the guilty one. Had I gone back to her right then, after I was first close to her, she might have offered me her love. Did I think I was so attractive that I could stay away and she would still leap up and shower me with affection whenever I showed my face? She was, no doubt, deeply drawn to me at first, withholding nothing. But I didn’t show up again for several months, and when I did, I ran off because of the curfew and didn’t come back for a month and a half. Meanwhile, someone else found her. Why did Shira decide to tell me the story of the whip? Did she mean to make me jealous? Does she imagine I’m fool enough to think she keeps herself for me? Anyway, the engineer’s behavior was a disgrace. Shira herself is even more of a disgrace, since her behavior provokes insolence, even violence. It’s a fact: any woman who invites a man home after one conversation deserves what she gets. She deserves to be beaten, not loved. The man who beat her was wielding his charm, to take revenge, to make her pay for her misbehavior. “What do you want from me?” Herbst cried out, as if Shira were there, torturing him. “My God, my God,” he cried out, and as he cried out he was overcome with wonder, like a man in trouble who sees help and salvation.

The night they walked along the road to Beit Yisrael, Shira had asked Herbst, “Are you Orthodox?” She had told him, “I’m not Orthodox, and I don’t care for the Orthodox.” When she said this, he hadn’t given it a second thought. Now that he was alone, thinking of her and her behavior, an undefined question began to form in his mind. It could be articulated in these terms: It’s true, isn’t it, that, when one rejects religion, spiritual restraints are also suspended, that the soul casts off its restraints, and actions are no longer examined? Herbst was neither a believer nor an atheist. His research never led him to consider questions of faith. Not many of those who studied Byzantium were as familiar as Herbst with the endless strife, disputes, intrigues, conspiracies, murders, and massacres in the name of religion that occupied Christian sects in Byzantium from the time of Christianity’s early triumphs to Islam’s conquests. Still, his erudition did not compel him to reflect on the nature of his own faith. Now that he was invoking heaven because of his distress, a spark flared up for him and died as soon as it was lit. A spark that goes out immediately gives no light; it doubles the darkness. Out of anger, out of anguish, out of foolish self-pity, out of a need to act, he picked up a book and banged it on the table. With the exception of a cloud of dust, the act achieved nothing.

I don’t know how you relate to the contemplative process. When Manfred Herbst has an issue to contemplate, he begins by turning it over, abandoning it midway to consider matters that are tangential but not part of the issue, and ending up where he started. So, at this point, involved as he was with Shira, he moved on to Lisbet Neu. Along with these two, he considered several others — women he had been with at the university, women he had met later at scholarly events. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed with the realization that some of these women were working in the very fields he was working in, although they were very different from him. And it was this difference that unsettled and disturbed his soul. After visualizing their beauty, their coiffures, their fragrance, their manners, he fixed his mind on Lisbet Neu, hoping she would save him from them and from Shira. But the One who was created only to trouble us said derisively: What’s it to me if this fool doubles his trouble?

Suddenly, Zahara’s cheerful voice was heard calling him to lunch. Herbst answered, “I’ll be right there.” Zahara called again, “Father, the food is getting cold.” Herbst called out, “I’m on my way.” He picked up two or three stones from the bunch he had collected on an archeological dig and placed them on his papers, so they wouldn’t blow in the wind, arranged his pads and notebooks, and took a quick inventory — not like those scholars who estimate how many pages they can make out of a given amount of material, but like a builder amassing lumber and stone for construction.

Manfred Herbst was sitting there; his wife, Henrietta, was sitting there; Zahara, their daughter, was sitting there. They were eating together. The table was covered with a heavy cloth made of coarse fabric Henrietta had bought from the husband of Sarini the wetnurse. Henrietta was saving the things she had brought from her mother’s house for her daughters, with the idea of dividing them between them when they had homes of their own. She did this with the silver cutlery, substituting cheap metal utensils, as well as with the linen tablecloths, which she replaced with this coarse fabric. Now, the Herbsts were sitting together. Papa Herbst and Mama Herbst and Zahara, their eldest daughter, were sitting and eating lunch. Though it was an ordinary day and the food was ordinary, there was something exceptional about this lunch. Not only for her father and mother, but even for Zahara. The vegetables Zahara’s mother cooked were not her ordinary fare, though they came from the kvutza and she herself had brought them. The quality produce grown in the fields of Ahinoam is sent to market, and the kvutza eats only what fails to make the grade. Zahara took a double helping, feeling love for her mother, for whatever her mother did, and it seemed to her that she had never loved her mother as she did at that moment, though she knew, clearly, that she loved her mother then as always. This was true of the table, the dishes, everything in the house: in its rooms, which were dearer to her today than ever before; in the vegetable garden, whose beauty was displayed between every furrow. Only her mother could dig those little holes so they hugged the seedlings that were at rest there, saturated with rich water, pleased with the brown earth, content with the fertilizer and with the sun above, welcoming the grasshoppers that leaped over them, circled around, jumped, flew, and finally landed on their long legs. Not to mention the wondrous air that stretched between grasshopper and garden row, and was sometimes endowed with a color known as Berlin blue. Her heart expanded to include love upon love. This love augmented itself and engulfed her father. Zahara knew her father well, every line, every mark on his face. Still, she stared at him as if she had never seen him before. Zahara studied him, his forehead, his hair, his person — this precious human being whom she never tired of watching, not realizing her eyes were closed and what she saw of her father was in her own mind. This was her father, and she could barely begin to describe to her friends in Ahi-noam even a particle of what she found in him. In truth, no one in Ahinoam had asked about her father, not even in jest; for example: What sort of individual is your venerable progenitor? And no one there seemed interested in such things, not even Avraham-and-a-half or Heinz the Berliner. They didn’t ask about her father either. Just because no one there asked about her father, she found herself thinking about him, even now that she was with him and her thoughts were not colored by the magic of distance. Only good sense kept her from reaching out and wrapping her arms around his neck, for she wouldn’t have wanted to be considered sentimental.