Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam Page 18

  The young man answered, “Go, Gemulah, follow your husband.”

  Gemulah said, “After all the years that I have waited for you! Now you say, ‘Go, Gemulah.’”

  “He is your husband,” the young man said.

  “And you, Hakham Gideon,” said Gemulah, “what are you to me?”

  “I am nothing.”

  Gemulah laughed. “So you are nothing! You are a good man, you are a lovely man, in all the world there is no man so good and so lovely as you. Let me stay with you, and I shall sing you the song of the bird Grofit, which she sings only once in her lifetime.”

  “Sing,” said the young man.

  Gemulah said, “I shall sing the song of Grofit, and then we shall die. Gabriel, when Hakham Gideon and I are dead, dig us two graves side by side. Do you promise you will do that?”

  Gamzu put his hand over her mouth and held on with all his might. She struggled to escape from his arms, but he held her tight and shouted to Ginat, “Do you know what you are? A sinner in Israel, that’s what you are! You are not even afraid to steal another man’s wife!”

  “Don’t listen to him, Hakham Gideon,” cried Gemulah. “I am not any man’s wife. Ask him, has he ever seen my naked body?”

  Gamzu let out a long and bitter sigh. “You are my wife,” he said, “my wife, my wife! You are consecrated to me by the law of Moses and of Israel.”

  The young man said, “Go, Gemulah, go with your husband.”

  “So you reject me,” said Gemulah.

  “I do not reject you, Gemulah,” said the young man, “I only tell you what you must do.”

  With that, her strength left her, and were it not that Gamzu still held her she would have fallen. And once Gamzu had grasped her, he did not let go of her until he took her up in his arms and went away, while Ginat and I looked on.

  VII

  The moon went her way, completing her journey of thirty days. Thirty days had now passed since Gamzu took his wife back from the house of Ginat, and all this time I saw neither Ginat nor Gamzu. I did not see Gamzu because he did not come to my home, and I am not in the habit of going to his; as for Ginat, he went away immediately after that affair. I came across him once in an Arab coffeehouse, with Amram, the son of the Samaritan high priest. Since nothing came of it, I shall not dwell on it. Once again I found him in Giv’at Shaul, at the parchment workshop belonging to Hakham Gvilan and Hakham Gagin. Again, nothing came of it, and I shall not dwell on it.

  My wife and children have returned from their holiday; the water has returned to the tanks, to the pipes, and to the taps. I stay at home and rarely go out, nor do I know how Gemulah has been faring with Gamzu since he took her back. Since, on balance, goodness outweighs evil, I assume that she has made her peace with him, and that having done so, her own language has returned to her. Perhaps she even allows herself to sing, and once more her voice stirs the heart like the voice of the bird Grofit; and as you know, Gamzu loves nothing so much as Gemulah’s voice lifted in song. Why then did Gamzu lay his hand over her mouth to silence her? Because songs are conjoined, they are linked up one with another, the songs of the springs with the songs of high mountains, and those of high mountains with the songs of the birds of the air. And among these birds there is one whose name is Grofit; when its hour comes to leave the world, it looks up to the clouds and raises its voice in song; and when its song is ended, it departs from this world. All these songs are linked together in the language of Gemulah. Had she uttered that song of Grofit, her soul would have departed from her, and she would have died. For this reason Gamzu stopped up her mouth and preserved her soul that it might not depart.

  I stay at home, then, and continue with my work, whether it be little or much. But when the sun sets I lay my work aside. “Behold that which I have seen: it is good, it is comely”—and so forth— “to toil under the sun,” for so long as the sun shines upon the world, it is good, it is comely in the world. If I have a little strength left when my work is done, I go for a walk. Otherwise, I sit alone in front of my house or stand in the window and watch how the day passes and the night comes, how the stars take their places in the sky and the moon rises.

  The moon and stars have not yet come out. But the sky gleams with its own light, burning from within, and a blue-grey glow, like the bloom on a ripe plum, hovers between heaven and earth, while the whole world is alive with the chirping of countless crickets. Not far from my house there is a commotion among the trees. It continues until it sounds like a forest on a stormy night, like a sea in tempest. I wonder if something is not astir in the world.

  I have stood alone and looked behind the back of the world; and because so much has already happened, I have looked away from events that are at present taking shape. One of those past happenings was the affair of Gamzu and Gemulah: the story of a man who comes home and does not find his wife; going to the south, turning to the north, turning turning, he goes on, and at the last finds her in a house where he chances to be. But what truly amazed me was this: with my own eyes I had seen Gamzu snatch his wife away, and yet it seemed to me that it was only a story, like the one he himself had told me, of how on one occasion dances were held, and Gadi Ben Ge’im was about to seize Gemulah, and Gamzu forestalled him. There is no event whose mark has not gone before it. Such is the parable of the bird: before it flies, it spreads its wings and they make a shadow; it looks at the shadow, raises its wings, and flies away.

  The moon has not yet appeared, but she is about to rise, and a place is set aside for her in the sky. Clouds that seemed a portion of the sky itself are parted now, moving this way and that on their course, while the moon ripens towards her rising. Happy is he who can make use of her light without being touched by it.

  My thoughts turn to those who long for the moon. And from thoughts of the moon, to thoughts that are bound up and conjoined with the way earth binds us. And from earth to man. To those whom the earth welcomes, and those who wander about like the shades of night. I do not refer especially to that young couple who had not found a home for themselves; nor especially to those who left the country and, on their return, found that the land had become estranged from them. Nor do I mean in particular Greifenbach and his wife, who went abroad to take a rest from the strain of life in our country. I refer to all men who are in the grip of this earth.

  Greifenbach and his wife are about to return. Their cleaning woman, Grazia, told me this; a picture postcard from Mrs. Greifenbach had come for her. I know this, too, from the contents of a card they wrote to me. And since they are about to arrive, I have been to see how their house is faring.

  Their house is locked up. No one has broken in. I do not know if Ginat is in his room or not. At any rate, the window that opened for Gemulah is now closed. When the Greifenbachs return to Jerusalem, they will find everything securely in its place.

  Next morning when I picked up the newspaper to see if the Greifenbachs’ return was announced, I read that a Dr. Gilat was dead. Since I was not acquainted with any person of that name, I did not linger over the news. But my heart sank, and when a man’s heart behaves irregularly, evil things begin to take shape. I began to wonder if there was a misprint and “l” had been substituted for “n.” Once a man enters into evil speculations, they do not leave him. I took up the paper again and saw the letter “l” standing out plainly in the dead man’s name, yet my eyes which could see the “l” also saw “n,” as if the “l” had been twisted and turned into an “n.” The matter troubled me so much that I got up and went out.

  I looked at the announcements on the walls but found no declaration of his death. Ginat did not hold an official post and was not known in town; there was nobody to publicize his death on the billboards. But I learned from another source that he was indeed dead, and how his death came about.

  I shall start at the beginning. I was walking the streets and reflecting to myself: If it was Ginat, why was the name written as Gilat? And if it was indeed Gilat, why do I have these forebodings?

/>   Old Amrami, leaning upon his granddaughter, came across me and said, “Are you going to the funeral?”

  I nodded and said that I was.

  “What a strange case!” he said. “A woman who can’t move from her bed meets her death on a roof.”

  I looked at him long and hard without knowing what he meant.

  He went on to say, “Mysterious are the ways of God; who can understand them? A man risks his life to save another life in Israel, and the end of it is, he falls and is killed. So now we are not going to one funeral, but to two. To the funeral of Gamzu’s wife, and to the funeral of Dr. Ginat.”

  Amrami’s granddaughter Edna added, “The newspapers didn’t report this, but eyewitnesses say that last night a gentleman went out of his room and saw a woman climbing up onto the roof. He rushed up to save her from danger, the parapet collapsed, and they both fell to their death.”

  So we walked, Amrami and Edna and I, until we reached the hospital where the bodies of Gemulah and Ginat had been brought. The hospital was closed. At the gate sat the porter, looking at passers- by, daydreaming that they were all asking his permission to go inside and were all being refused. But his luck was out; not a man asked if he might enter the hospital, but all went into the open courtyard where the mortuary stood.

  At the side of the courtyard, standing apart, was the patients’ laundry. Small as it was, it performed a service to the dead, for it fulfilled the obligation of hospitality by admitting visitors. Alongside it, on a broken bench, sat three members of the burial society, professional watchers of the dead, while a fourth stood up behind them and rolled himself a cigarette. He saw Amrami and me and attached himself to us, telling us that he had sat all night beside the corpse, reciting psalms for the dead. And who, he wanted to know, was going to pay him for saying those psalms? He could tell I was an honest man; he would grant me the mitzvah of paying him.

  A family of mourners came and sat down on the bench opposite. A woman detached herself from the group and walked in front of them, raising her voice in loud wailing and laments, swaying her shrunken body to the rhythm. She was sad, very sad, and so was her voice. Not a word that she uttered could I understand, but her voice, her bearing, and the expression on her face moved all who saw her to tears. The woman took from her bosom the picture of a young man and gazed at it intently. Again she sang, in praise of his beauty and his grace, recounting all the years he would have had for life, had not the angel of death come for him too soon. All the mourners wept bitterly, and all who heard them wept in sympathy. Just so Gemulah must have wept for her father, just so she must have mourned him.

  As I stood among them, I saw Gamzu coming out of the mortuary. The perplexity of soul that always accompanied him had left him for a while; in its place came two new companions, astonishment and sorrow. I went up to him and stood by his side. He rubbed his dead eye with his finger, then took out a handkerchief and wiped his finger, saying, “He was the one. He was the Jerusalem Hakham, and he was the scholar I sold the talismans to.”

  One of the mortuary attendants came over to us. He looked once at me and once at Gamzu, like a dealer who has two customers and wonders which he should attend to first. While trying to make up his mind which of us was the more important, he asked for a cigarette. Gamzu searched in his pocket and took out cigarette paper and tobacco. In the meantime they brought out Ginat’s coffin. Gamzu lifted his finger to his dead eye and said calmly, “Ginat is the one who bought the talismans.”

  The coffin bearers moved on; about half the necessary Minyan, I and three or four others who were at hand, followed to perform the last rites. A beggar with a tin box approached. He banged on his box, calling repeatedly, “Charity saves from death.” Each time he looked behind him, lest in the meanwhile other bodies had been brought out and he should stand to miss what the accompanying mourners might give him.

  On the way back from the Mount of Olives, Gemulah’s funeral procession caught up with me. And on the way back from Gemulah’s funeral I was stopped by an automobile in which sat the Greifenbachs, just returned from their travels.

  Greifenbach saw me and called from inside the automobile, “How nice to see you! How really nice! How is our house getting on? Is it still standing?”

  Mrs. Greifenbach asked, “Has nobody broken in?”

  “No,” I answered, “no one has broken in.”

  Again she asked, “Did you get to know Ginat?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I got to know Ginat.”

  Both of them said together, “Get in and ride with us.”

  I answered, “Good, I shall get in and ride with you.”

  A policeman came along and shouted that we were holding up traffic. The driver started up the car, and the Greifenbachs went on without me.

  Some days later, I went to the Greifenbachs to return their key. On the same day officials had come to examine Dr. Ginat’s room, but they found nothing except his ordinary utensils and two tins full of the ash of burnt papers. The ash was probably made up of his writings. When had Ginat burnt these? On the night when Gamzu took Gemulah back? Or on the same night that Ginat went out to save Gemulah and was killed with her?

  What induced Ginat to destroy his own work, to burn in a few minutes the result of years of toil? As is usual in such cases, the question is disposed of lightly. It was psychological depression, they say; grave doubts brought him to this deed. But what led him to such a state of depression, and what were those doubts of his? To these questions no answer is forthcoming. For surely there is no way of estimating, no way of knowing or understanding such a matter, especially where one is dealing with an enlightened spirit such as Ginat, and with works of wisdom and poetry such as his. No explanations can affect the issue, no accounts of causes alter it. These are no more than the opinions people put forward in order to exercise their ingenuity in words without meaning on cases that cannot be solved, on happenings for which there is no solace. Even if we say that events are ordained from the beginning, we have not come to the end of the chain, and the matter is certainly not settled; nor does any knowledge of causes remove our disquiet. They found this, too, in Ginat’s room: a deed of annulment, in which Ginat canceled the rights of the publishers to bring out his books, forbidding them to reprint his vocabulary (that is, the ninety-nine words of the Edo language), and his book of grammar (meaning the grammar of Edo), and his book of Enamite Hymns.

  As usual, the dead man’s orders were not carried out. On the contrary, his books are printed in increasing numbers, so that the world is already beginning to know his works, and especially the Enamite Hymns with their grace and beauty. While a great scholar lives those who choose to see his learning, see it; those who do not, see nothing there. But once he is dead, his soul shines out ever more brightly from his works, and anyone who is not blind, anyone who has the power to see, readily makes use of his light.

  Annotations to “Edo and Enam”

  In attempting to uncover the complexities of the kabbalistic sources woven throughout “Edo and Enam” (and the rest of Agnon’s canon) the reader will find a very useful research tool in Elchanan Shilo, HaKabbalah BeYetzirat Agnon (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan Univeristy Press, 2011).

  Meshulam Tochner identifies the names Edo and Enam as echoing the roots of the Hebrew words ye’ud (destiny) and ma’ayan (source).

  101. Riots of 1929 / Series of violent demonstrations and riots in August 1929 set off by a dispute between Muslims and Jews over access to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, resulting in many Jewish deaths (most severely the massacre of 67 in Hebron) and widespread property damage. Agnon’s home in Talpiot was marauded during these riots.

  Agnon’s library after the 1929 riots

  103. Cadence of a woman’s song / This is potentially a reference to the theory advanced by Shlomo Dov Goitein, who suggested that the Biblical Song of Songs was composed by a female court, but ascribed to Solomon, as was customary. He published this theory in the wake of his ethnographic studies on the Yemenite Jewish communi
ty and the Biblical cadences of its female poetic singers. Goitein (1900–85) was a distinguished historian, specializing in Jewish life under Medieval Islam, and was a close friend of Agnon. This topic is discussed, most recently, in Ilana Pardes, Agnon’s Moonstruck Lovers: The Song of Songs in Israeli Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), pp. 60–65. Pardes’ study focuses on the presence of the Song of Songs in the intertextual matrix of the two stories in this volume – “Betrothed” and “Edo and Enam”.

  S.D. Goitein

  105. Faust / Faust, protagonist of a classic German legend, is a frustrated scholar whose pact with the Devil grants him unlimited knowledge in exchange for his soul. Goethe’s Faust is an early 19th century play in two parts.

  106. Solomon Ibn Gabirol / (c. 1021–1058) Among the greatest Hebrew poets and philosophers of Spanish Jewry. The legend of Ibn Gabirol’s creating a female servant (à la legends of the Golem) is recorded in Joseph Solomon Delmedigo’s 17th century work Matzref LeHokhmah (9b) and cited in Agnon’s anthology Sefer, Sofer ve-Sippur, p. 244 (2000 edition).

  Statue of Ibn Gabirol in Malaga, Spain

  109. Mandate government / The British Mandate over Palestine administered civil affairs from 1920–1948.

  109. Gederah / A town in central Israel.

  111. Your happiness is where you are not / Closing line to Mordechai Zvi Maneh’s 1884 poem HaNoded (“The Wanderer”). Maneh (1859–86) was a lyrical Hebrew poet of the First Aliyah period, who wrote longingly for the Land of Israel, although he died of tuberculosis before he could leave his native town of Radoshkovich (in today’s Belarus). My thanks to Dr. Shuli Marom for help in identifying this line.