Henrietta is pleased with Firadeus’s work, Manfred is pleased with her manner, and Sarah prefers her to all her dolls. Firadeus is only sixteen, and she supports six people: herself, her mother, her mother’s mother, her father’s blind father, and Manawa, the madwoman they found on the road from Persia to Jerusalem, as well as her little brother, Ziyon. He was born the day her father was killed by an Arab rogue when he was on his way to dump Talpiot’s garbage. Ziyon the father, who was Talpiot’s garbage man, is still remembered fondly by the local housewives; if he found something that had fallen into the garbage by mistake, he would return it. He was mentioned by the chairman at the first meeting of the Talpiot Committee, and all the members stood in silence to honor his memory. How can six souls subsist on Firadeus’s meager wages? While most of her friends sit around telling fortunes, fussing with their hair or their jewelry, Firadeus sits with her mother, wrapping pamphlets given to her by a gentleman with a stiff collar who lives near her employer and pays her half a grush for each piece. If he gives her a hundred pamphlets and she doesn’t return them all, he’s not particular. He pays for the whole lot, realizing that neighbors come by, see writing in the holy tongue, take it to read, and don’t return it, and she, being so young, doesn’t dare to speak up to her elders and say, “Don’t take it.” As was already stated, Firadeus is quick, conscientious, and altogether dependable. If she is told to do something a certain way, that is how she does it. Sometimes even before there is time to say anything, it’s done. Firadeus has another fine quality: she sees everything. I’ll give only one example. The Herbsts were in the habit of having their servants eat with them. The first time Firadeus ate with them, Tamara kept tapping her nose to call her parents’ attention to the girl’s repulsive table manners. In a very few days, Firadeus learned to handle a knife and fork more skillfully, perhaps, than Tamara. Herbst and his wife are not ethnographers; they’re not engaged in studying the different communities. But, when they first arrived in the country, they used to go to the Bukharan streets on Shabbat and holidays to watch the people in their colorful garments. Similarly, they used to take tourists to see the Yemenites in their synagogues. Having had their fill, they no longer concern themselves with all the tribes of Israel to be found in Jerusalem and are no longer able to distinguish the ethnic groups from one another. I would not be mistaken were I to say that Herbst is more attuned to the various Germanic peoples in Jerusalem than to the tribes of Israel. Still, when he hears these peoples being maligned, he responds, “You can say what you like about them, all but the Persians.” There is one problem with Firadeus: sometimes she shows up and sometimes she doesn’t, because her employers live among Arabs, in a neighborhood ruled by hoodlums, where every stone is waiting to be flung at a Jewish head. When Firadeus comes, she takes on all the housework, and her mistress sits writing letters to relatives in Germany. If she doesn’t come, all the work falls on Henrietta, since Tamara is inept when it comes to housework.
At this time, Tamara had an opportunity to visit Greece. How? A group of university students was going on a scholarly expedition. When Tamara heard about it, she wanted to travel too, to breathe the air of other places, never having been out of the Land of Israel except once, when she toured the cities of Lebanon, which she considered part of her own country. Tamara wasn’t a student and couldn’t qualify as a scholar. Her knowledge of Greek culture could be inscribed on the tip of a lipstick without making a dent. But she was lucky. One of the women backed out, and there was room for Tamara. The cost was minimal, since both governments offered large discounts for students. Also, Mother Henrietta managed to skimp on household expenses to make it possible for Tamara to go.
Tamara “spoiled” her parents with picture postcards. Whenever she found a post office, she sent a card. To spoil them further, she adorned her cards with rhymes about her companions, about the food, the drink, the person who dipped his cheese in wine, and so on. Henrietta reads them and remarks, astonished, “Tamara is no poet, but look, Fred, the rhymes seem to roll right off her tongue.” Manfred laughs. “Your good taste has vanished, Henriett. You read Stefan George, and you’re enthralled; you read some jingles, and you’re equally enthralled.” Henrietta says, “Still, it’s a miracle to have such control of a language that you can make rhymes.” Manfred says, “Rhymes without meter are lower than the lowest prose. Tamara reminds me of Professor Lemner. When he utters a Greek or Latin proverb, he drowns it in a sneeze so his mistakes won’t be noticed.”
One day a letter came from Tamara with an amusing story. In Athens, a wealthy young man wanted to marry her and had approached the professor in charge of the group to ask for her hand, because Athenian Jews follow patriarchal practices and wouldn’t dare ask a girl for her hand without her guardian’s permission. Henrietta laughed, as if it were a joke. Manfred didn’t laugh. Manfred almost fainted. Until that moment, Manfred had never noticed that Tamara was old enough to marry. Manfred didn’t think his daughter Tamara was different from her peers; but, like most parents, he forgot what it’s like to be young. Herbst was pleased that his daughter was superior in one respect: she wasn’t involved with those who want both sides of the Jordan as a Jewish state. The subject of Tamara has come up again, and again I am ambivalent about telling her story. Since it is too long to write with one drop of ink, I will leave it for now and get back to where I was.
When he was done with the offprints, Herbst felt listless. He barely made it back to his desk. As usual on such days, he did a lot of sitting and a lot of smoking. The tobacco smell neutralized the book smell, and he himself was neutralized by the clouds of smoke. When Henrietta came into the room, she had to clear a trail with her hands. When she went to open a window to let in air, she found it was open, but a pillar of cigarette smoke trapped at the window prevented the air from flowing in or out.
The air suited his thoughts, which were first and foremost about Shira. He himself — which is to say, his work, from which he still considered himself inseparable — came second. Third was Henrietta. His thoughts about Henrietta were roughly these: In any case, Henrietta’s lot is better than that of her relatives in Germany. She doesn’t live in fear — of police, of informers, of her husband being suddenly taken away and returned as ashes in a sealed box. She even has a garden with vegetables and flowers, as well as a chicken coop, all of which Henrietta had dreamed of in Germany when they were preparing to leave. She used to say, “I’ll go to Palestine, find some land there, and plant a garden, like the pioneers.” Someone else occupied Herbst’s thoughts: his eldest daughter, Zahara. But she wasn’t as persistent a presence as Shira, his work, or his wife, though she was perhaps closer to his heart than the others. His thoughts about Zahara were entwined with thoughts about Tamara that remained somewhat amorphous.
The cigarette smoke was occasionally invaded by the fragrance of the garden, the rooster’s cry, a chirping bird, Henrietta’s footsteps, little Sarah, or a student or colleague. Herbst deals with each one of his callers in terms of his nature and business, then sees him out and returns to the box of notecards, saying, “Here’s another note, and yet another.” The notes extended in several directions without coming together. The author of these notes is drawn in several directions too, but he doesn’t pull himself together either.
Herbst was like the poet who lost his baggage on a trip and was asked if his shadow was lost too, a question that inspired him to write a wondrous tale about a lost shadow. So it was with Herbst. Having lost the desire to deal with his notes, he became interested in something that, for him, was like a wondrous tale. That poet was privileged to write Peter Schlemihl, whereas Herbst wasn’t privileged to fulfill his wishes. I will nonetheless relate his wish. I will also relate the chain of events that led him to fix his attention on a subject other than his academic work.