A Simple Story Read online

  So Blume lived with her cousins, cut off from the rest of the world. The girls from poor families who worked for the Hurvitzes’ neighbors did not seek her company—nor, needless to say, did she seek theirs. The employment agents whom the housemaids tried to cultivate were not so shameless as to approach her—and, needless to say again, she did not approach them. Of necessity she was confined to the Hurvitz household, which was not one with many diversions. Its members were busy all day in their store, from which they returned only to gulp down a meal or to sleep, while if they went for a walk on the Sabbath or a holiday, or were invited to dine with friends, they always left Blume behind. A house needed watching, and who was there to watch it if not she? Thus, she was left to her own devices, with neither the amusements of a housemaid nor the entertainments of a better-off girl her own age to help pass the time.

  Blume’s stay with her cousins was a long one. Tsirl neither pampered nor picked on her. Indeed, Tsirl knew how to get along with people. She ran a shipshape shop, knew the customs of each customer, and never looked down at anyone, not even at the poorest of buyers. “Today he bought for a penny,” she would say, “but tomorrow he can win a lottery and buy for a pound.” The tiniest tot who came to make the smallest purchase was treated by her with affection, fondled by the chin, and given an extra little something. “Now that he’s small,” Tsirl said, “so are his needs. But when he’s big they’ll be great. If I’m nice to him now, he’ll keep coming back then. Lots of rich men in this town used to come to my father once a year as boys to buy a carob pod on Tu b’Shvat. Now they buy whole bagfuls of almonds and raisins every day.”

  The Hurvitzes’ store was not the only one in Szybusz. A whole row of shops ran along the big market, one squeezed tightly against the other, quite apart from those in the little market and along various other streets. Each had its slack and busy seasons, its good and bad days, except for the Hurvitzes’, which was crowded with shoppers all the time. A man might have found himself hard-pressed to explain why he preferred it; yet even for ordinary smelling salts of the kind prescribed by the doctors and sold in every pharmacy, it was the place one went to, for Tsirl’s cheery manner in itself was good for whatever ailed one.

  And just as she was considerate toward everyone, so she was with Blume. If, for instance, she came across an old dress that did not fit her, or a shoe that had seen better days, she was sure to give it to her cousin. As long as it was usable, Blume could use it, and only when it wasn’t was it discarded. “I myself save everything,” Tsirl liked to say. “Not like our Blume, who throws out whatever she doesn’t care for.” Though a person might have thought that Tsirl was finding fault, anyone knowing her would have realized that she was simply stating a fact. And her husband was no less thoughtful; in fact, the slightest service performed for him by Blume always met with profuse thanks on his part. Not only did he never forget to say goodbye or hello to her when he left town on business or came back, he even thought of her when he was away, such as the time he brought her a small trinket from Karlsbad along with the gifts for his son and wife. “Most men,” remarked Tsirl, “haven’t the faintest notion of what a woman likes to get. But not my Boruch Meir. He knew exactly what Blume needed, and that’s what he brought her. Or maybe he just felt it in his blood, because she is a blood relation.”

  Even Hirshl was friendly toward Blume and never forgot that the two of them came from the same stock. If his shirt collar was creased while being ironed, he did not complain about it, nor did he ever ask her to polish his shoes. Hirshl did not have his mother’s knack of making even his criticisms sound like compliments, nor did his eyes twinkle good-humoredly like his father’s. He was young and still had to learn that a twinkle or a kind word could be turned to one’s advantage. And yet, though he was only sixteen years old, he was old enough to know that life was no idyll. There were those who claimed that the whole problem with the world was its being divided into the rich and the poor. Indeed, that was a problem. Certainly, though, it was not the main one. The main problem was that everything came about with so much pain.

  Hirshl himself could not explain this pain. From the moment he first saw the light of day he never lacked for food or clothing, nor for the attention of good people who lavished him with kindness and lovingly fulfilled his every wish. Perhaps he had eyes to see that the same people who were so good to him were not always as good to others, which grieved him. And perhaps he was still only a boy with a somewhat impractical turn of mind.

  Chapter two

  Hirshl was his parents’ only child, born to them when they were no longer young. Not until they had despaired of having a son were they finally granted one, whom they called Shimon Hirsh after his maternal grandfather. The first of these two names, however, vanished in the cradle, while the second gained an affectionate diminutive.

  As soon as Hirshl was weaned, Tsirl went back to working full-time in the store. She was not expecting more children. Not that she sought to prevent them. Yet neither was she anxious to have them, especially since one never knew in advance who was lucky to be born and who was not. And though Hirshl was her only child, she was careful not to show him too much love in order not to spoil him. Boruch Meir, on the other hand, more than made up for this by loving his son to excess.

  Boruch Meir was a man smiled upon by fortune. All his undertakings prospered, and whatever came his way increased in his possession. He never bothered to ask whether he deserved such success; nor, so it seemed, did success. In a dim way he felt sure that anyone who worked as hard as he did would get his just deserts in the end. He himself had started out in the store as a shopboy and was now its wealthy proprietor and the husband of its first owner’s daughter.

  Indeed, fortune’s smile could be seen in Boruch Meir’s face, glistening in his beard and sparkling in his eyes that were jolly even when he was alone. Life treated him well, his inner life too, for if conscience generally kept him from temptation, self-regard saw to it that, if tempted, he did not reproach himself overly much. On Sabbaths, holidays, and days of the New Moon he regularly attended synagogue, though had anyone told him, A man like you ought to pray in public more often, Boruch Meir would have gone daily, for he was willing to take advice and did not make a point of relying too much on himself. He was not especially generous; yet when asked to give to charity he did, sometimes more, sometimes less, and sometimes handsome sums to the beggars whom Tsirl simply scolded and told to go do something useful and stop bothering honest folk. “The world,” Boruch Meir would say to her, “is not going to change if a single do-nothing does something, and I am not going to lose my shirt if I give him a penny.” And just as he got on well with the world, preferring to let it have its way so that he might concentrate on his business, so he was on good terms with his own employees, whom he never was bossy with, though he did forbid them to nibble at the merchandise, since this made it unappetizing to the customers.

  From the day Boruch Meir went to work in Shimon Hirsh Klinger’s store he felt a special bond with his patron. At first sight the old man, who used to bathe in the river until nearly wintertime and insisted on attending to all his own needs, won Boruch Meir’s heart. Indeed, Boruch Meir could not say which amazed him more, the fact that the whole world did not seem worthy to Tsirl’s father of being looked at, or the fact that Shimon Hirsh knew all about it without having to look at it at all. The moment he stepped into his store, without even lifting his eyes, he knew exactly what and how much had been sold, even of bulk items like almonds, raisins, and the like. The town gossip had it that the old man went over his stock every night, weighing all the merchandise and checking each box and crate. Boruch Meir, however, did not believe a word of this. And since he could think of no rational ways to account for Shimon Hirsh’s omniscience, he was left with irrational ones, which only increased his amazement. Shimon Hirsh Klinger, for his part, was sparing of explanations. “A store,” he once said, “is not a synagogue, where everyone sits around and gabs.” In fact, apart
from an occasional “hmmmm,” his employees never heard a word from him, a long “hmmmm” being a sign that he was pleased with them and a short one that he was not. Yet there were no slackers among them. Whoever landed a job in Shimon Hirsh Klinger’s store soon taught himself to do its owner’s bidding.

  Boruch Meir had worked six and a half years for Shimon Hirsh Klinger and been spoken to by him no more than were his fellow employees when one night the two men happened to lodge in the same roadside inn. Boruch Meir was returning from his native town in high spirits, both because of an army exemption he had gotten and because of an attractive cousin of his whom he was about to take for a wife. In the room in the inn was a guest who was doing sums in an account book so loudly that no one was able to sleep. At last, feeling that Boruch Meir was looking at him, the man asked, “Am I disturbing you?” “Not at all,” answered Boruch Meir gently, going over to the table as he spoke and blowing out the lamp. Shimon Hirsh Klinger was staying in the same room. “I liked that,” he said to Boruch Meir. “I always thought you were an innocent lamb, but now I see that you have character.” Whereupon he began to chat with him like a friend. Before they had gone their separate ways, Shimon Hirsh Klinger had given Boruch Meir his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  At first, even when he was already married, Boruch Meir felt uncertain whether his new wife saw in him anything more than her lawful husband; all day long he courted her as though they had just met and some part of her was not yet fully his. Often he would sit looking at her and wonder, What is it about her that she still is withholding from me? Not that she seemed to be concealing anything, but whatever she revealed was a mystery to him too. Every movement of her body, every dress that she wore, made her seem like a different person. Day by day he felt his love for her grow, yet the more he loved her, the more baffled by her he became. And this baffled her and made her ask, What does he want from me that he hasn’t yet gotten?

  Only with the birth of their son did Boruch Meir feel at last that all had been given him and that the most deeply treasured of Tsirl’s desires was now in his hands. Did he not hold the boy in his arms, press him to his heart, and play with him even in her absence? Henceforward he loved her more than ever because of her son, just as he loved the boy because of his mother. And though Boruch Meir had never shirked work in his life, he now worked twice as hard. Not a day went by without some innovation in the store or some new item for sale there. He even began selling tanning and smelling salts, as well as house paints and sign paints, for Szybusz was changing with the times. Once, if a man had been sick, he was bled, whereas now he took baths full of salts; once, he whitewashed his house, now he painted it; once, the sign above his shop had hung there for a lifetime, while now shops went bankrupt as fast as they were opened and new signs were needed right away, sometimes with the name of the owner’s first wife and sometimes with the name of his second. But whoever wanted to buy cheaply still bought from Boruch Meir, it being a known fact that his prices were the lowest in town. Even other shopkeepers had begun to order from him, because Boruch Meir obtained all his merchandise at the source and bought and sold at a discount.

  Chapter three

  Hirshl was seventeen years old when he went to work in his parents’ store. He was neither as sharp-witted as his mother nor as quick on his feet as his father, but he did have the virtue of doing whatever he was told. As long as he had attended the old study house in the Little Synagogue his parents had hoped he would become a rabbi, yet in the end he had disappointed them by losing interest in such a career. Indeed, the study of Torah had lost its old prestige, so that many young Jewish boys nowadays were putting their religious books aside and turning to more useful occupations. The brightest of them enrolled in the universities, where they might acquire a well-paid profession, while those of more ordinary talents went into business or trade. There was also a third class of youngsters who neither studied religion nor did anything useful but who, supported by their parents, spent their days in such unworldly pursuits as Zionism or socialism. Neither the Zionists nor the socialists, however, were thought very highly of, the former because they were laughed at and the latter because they were feared.

  Of course, there were adults in Szybusz who were pro-Zionist themselves, attended every Zionist function, and held receptions, complete with coffee and cake, for visiting Zionist speakers, whom they then took to see the local sights, such as the Great Synagogue with its sun, moon, and twelve signs of the zodiac painted on its ceiling and its copper lantern, etched in whose glass panels was the blessing for the New Moon, or the old study house with its illuminated Hebrew Bible that had a marginal gloss in Latin written by a cardinal, and its copy of the original Venice edition of the Sefer Melekhet Mahshevet, which bore on its frontispiece an unusual engraving of the author, Rabbi Moses Hefetz, his hair unrabbinically long and his chin unrabbinically beardless. Even on ordinary days you might find such people in the Society for Zion clubhouse, reading a newspaper, or even debating from time to time what Zionism was all about. Yet their ranks, it must be said, were restricted to those Jews who were already comfortable enough off to have put away a nest egg and to have no worries about making ends meet.

  Hirshl himself was certainly bright enough to attend high school and university and even earn his doctor’s degree. His mother’s apprehensions, however, ruled out such a course, for Tsirl had had a brother who, instead of turning out normal, had been driven mad by his academic studies. Nothing done by his parents to cure him had helped in the least; when they tore up his books he had simply found others, and when they finally threw him out of the house he took to the woods and lived there on berries and plants like a beast until his vital powers failed him and he died. No sooner did Tsirl realize, therefore, that her son had tired of the Talmud than she hastened to put him to work in the store before he could develop any other interests. And though it started with no more than an odd day here or there, eventually Hirshl began to work full-time for his parents. There’s nothing like a business, thought Tsirl, for keeping a man healthy, wealthy, and safely out of harm’s way. Not that she respected religion and its scholars any less than the average woman did; still, like any occupation whose practical value was doubtful, it seemed to her less than ideal. Of course, there were rabbis who earned handsome livings too, but how many of them could you point to? Not even one per town, whereas the goods of a merchant were always in demand. And since Hirshl had given up his religious studies anyhow, what better future for him than the store?

  The fact of the matter was that, even when Tsirl had wanted her son to be a rabbi, this had stemmed less from her piety than from her desire to atone for the sin of her grandfather’s grandfather, who had once accused the rabbi of the town he lived in of an excess of religious enthusiasm. One time, that is, when this rabbi had done something that seemed quite absurdly pious, Tsirl’s great-great-grandfather had remarked to a fellow townsman, “I’m afraid that our rabbi is going out of his mind,” to which the rabbi had retorted, “If anyone is going to go out of his mind, it’s that man and his descendants.” And indeed, though Tsirl’s ancestor had spoken in an entirely disinterested manner, the rabbi’s vengeful curse came true nonetheless, since not even the most principled dispute is ever above personal animus. From that day on there was not a generation in Tsirl’s family without its madman—which was why, when Hirshl was born, his parents had sought to consecrate him to sacred studies as a penance for this ancient transgression. Not all men’s plans, however, are approved by Providence, especially when their motives are not selfless. And since Tsirl saw that Hirshl would never be what she desired of him, she decided that he might as well be what she could make of him.

  Hirshl’s first day in the store came at a time when his father, who was away taking the baths at Karlsbad, had left Tsirl alone with two shopgirls. “Come, give us a hand until your father gets back,” Tsirl had said to him, and Hirshl had folded down the corner of the page of the Talmud he was studying as though intending to re
turn to it soon—nor did it ever cross his mind that he would not. Yet the smell of the ginger, the cinnamon, the raisins, the wine, the brandy, and all the other good things there proved more enticing than the Talmud, just as the customers he waited on appealed to him more than did his fellow bench-sitters in the study house. For who, after all, still frequented the study house in those days? Young men who were bored to tears with their studies, the very opposite of the shopkeepers and their customers, most of whom seemed to know and do so much. By the time Boruch Meir returned from Karlsbad, Hirshl had become a shopkeeper himself. Instead of debating the Law in the study house he now haggled over prices in the store. Before long he never entered the Little Synagogue at all except to attend prayers on the Sabbath, holidays, and days of the New Moon.

  Like other boys from well-to-do homes who had studied to be rabbis and stopped, Hirshl joined the Society for Zion. The society owned a large room to which its members came to read newspapers and journals, or else to play chess on a board that stood on a table in a corner. Not all the newspapers and journals dealt with Zionism, nor was everyone who read them a Zionist. There were some who came to the clubhouse simply to read, just as there were others who came to socialize, for one way or another it was never a dull place. Sometimes, of a winter evening, as darkness descended on the world and one was filled with vague yearnings, a few of the club members might begin to sing such sad songs of longing for Zion that all hearts welled together. At such times the youngsters gathered there would appear to be as winningly transfigured as once they had been by the study of Torah.