A Tale of Love and Darkness (12 page)

My mother used to say about Agnon:

"That man sees and understands a lot."

And once she said:

"He may not be such a good man, but at least he knows bad from good, and he also knows we don't have much choice."

She used to read and reread the stories in the collection
At the Handles of the Lock
almost every winter. Perhaps she found an echo there of her own sadness and loneliness. I too sometimes reread the words of Tirzah Mazal, née Minz, at the beginning of "In the Prime of Her Life":

In the prime of her life my mother died. Some one and thirty years of age my mother was at her death. Few and evil were the days of the years of her life. All the day she sat at home, and she never went out of the house....Silent stood our house in its sorrow; its doors opened not to a stranger. Upon her bed my mother lay, and her words were few.

The words are almost the same as those that Agnon wrote to me about my mother: "She stood upon the doorstep, and her words were few."

As for me, when many years later I wrote an essay called "Who Has Come?" about the opening of Agnon's "In the Prime of Her Life," I dwelled on the apparently tautological sentence "All the day she sat at home, and she never went out of the house."

My mother did not sit at home all the day. She went out of the house a fair amount. But the days of the years of her life, too, were few and evil.

"The years of her life?" Sometimes I hear in these words the duality of my mother's life, and that of Lea, the mother of Tirzah, and that of Tirzah Mazal, née Minz. As if they too cast more than one shadow on the wall.

Some years later, when the General Assembly of Kibbutz Hulda sent me to the university to study literature, because the kibbutz school needed a literature teacher, I summoned up my courage and rang Mr. Agnon's doorbell one day (or in Agnon's language: "I took my heart and went to him").

"But Agnon is not at home," Mrs. Agnon said politely but angrily, the way she answered the throngs of brigands and highwaymen who came to rob her husband of his precious time. Mistress Agnon was not exactly lying to me: Mr. Agnon was indeed not at home, he was out at the back of the house, in the garden, whence he suddenly emerged, wearing slippers and a sleeveless pullover, greeted me, and then asked suspiciously, But who are you, sir? I gave my name and those of my parents, at which, as we stood in the doorway of his house (Mrs. Agnon having disappeared indoors without a word), Mr. Agnon remembered what wagging tongues had said in Jerusalem some years before, and placing his hand on my shoulder he said to me, "Aren't you the child who, having been left an orphan by his poor mother and distanced himself from his father, went off to live the life of the kibbutz? Are you not he who in his youth was reprimanded by his parents in this very house, because he used to pick the raisins off the cake?" (I did not remember this, nor did I believe him about the raisin picking, but I chose not to contradict him.) Mr. Agnon invited me in and questioned me for a while about my doings in the kibbutz, my studies (And what are they reading of mine in the university these days? And which of my books do you prefer?), and also inquired whom I had married and where my
wife's family came from, and when I told him that on her father's side she was descended from the seventeenth-century Talmudist and kabbalist Isaiah Horowitz, his eyes lit up and he told me two or three tales, by which time his patience was exhausted and it was evident that he was looking for a way of getting rid of me, but I summoned up my courage, even though I was sitting there on tiptoe, precisely as my mother had done before me, and told him what my problem was.

I had come because Professor Gershom Shaked had given his first-year students in Hebrew literature the task of comparing the stories set in Jaffa by Brenner and by Agnon, and I had read the stories and also everything I could find in the library about their friendship in Jaffa in the days of the Second Aliyah, and I was amazed that two such different men could have become friends. Yosef Hayyim Brenner was a bitter, moody, thickset, sloppy, irascible Russian Jew, a Dostoevskian soul constantly oscillating between enthusiasm and depression, between compassion and rage, a figure who at that time was already installed at the center of modern Hebrew literature and at the heart of the pioneering movement, while Agnon was then (only) a shy young Galician, several years Brenner's junior and still almost a literary virgin, a pioneer turned clerk, a refined, discriminating Talmud student, a natty dresser and a careful, precise writer, a thin, dreamy, yet sarcastic young man: what on earth could have drawn them so close to each other in the Jaffa of the days of the Second Aliyah, before the outbreak of the First World War, that they were almost like a pair of lovers? Today I think that I can guess something of the answer, but that day in Agnon's house, innocent as I was, I explained to my host the task I had been set, and innocently inquired if he would tell me the secret of his closeness to Brenner.

Mr. Agnon screwed up his eyes and looked at me, or rather scrutinized me, for a while with a sidelong glance, with pleasure, and a slight smile, the sort of smile—I later understood—that a butterfly catcher might smile on spotting a cute little butterfly. When he had finished eyeing me, he said:

"Between Yosef Hayyim, may God avenge his death, and me in those days there was a closeness founded on a shared love."

I pricked up my ears, in the belief that I was about to be told a secret to end all secrets, that I was about to learn of some spicy, concealed love story on which I could publish a sensational article and make
myself a household name overnight in the world of Hebrew literary research.

"And who was that shared love?" I asked with youthful innocence and a pounding heart.

"That is a strict secret," Mr. Agnon smiled, not to me but to himself, and almost winked to himself as he smiled, "yes, a strict secret, that I shall reveal to you only if you give me your word never to tell another living soul."

I was so excited that I lost my voice, fool that I was, and could only mouth a promise.

"Well then, strictly between ourselves I can tell you that when we were living in Jaffa in those days, Yosef Hayyim and I were both madly in love with Samuel Yosef Agnon."

Yes, indeed: Agnonic irony, a self-mocking irony that bit its owner at the same time as it bit his simple visitor, who had come to tug at his host's sleeve. And yet there was also a grain of truth hidden here, a vague hint of the secret of the attraction of a very physical, passionate man to a thin, spoiled youth, and also of the refined Galician youth to the venerated, fiery man who might take him under his fatherly wing, or offer him an elder brother's shoulder.

Yet it was actually not a shared love but a shared hatred that unites Agnon's stories to Brenner's. Everything that was false, rhetorical, or swollen by self-importance in the world of the Second Aliyah (the wave of immigration that ended with World War I), everything mendacious or self-glorifying in the Zionist reality, all the cozy, sanctimonious, bourgeois self-indulgence in Jewish life at that time, was loathed in equal measure by Agnon as by Brenner. Brenner in his writing smashed them with the hammer of his wrath, while Agnon pricked the lies and pretenses with his sharp irony and released the fetid hot air that inflated them.

Nonetheless, in Brenner's Jaffa as in Agnon's, among the throngs of shams and prattlers there shine dimly the occasional figures of a few simple men of truth.

Agnon himself was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath and wore a skullcap; he was, literally, a God-fearing man: in Hebrew, "fear" and "faith" are synonyms. There are corners in Agnon's stories where, in
an indirect, cleverly camouflaged way, the fear of God is portrayed as a terrible dread of God: Agnon believes in God and fears him, but he does not love him. "I am an easygoing sort of a man," says Daniel Bach in
A Guest for the Night
, "and I do not believe that the Almighty desires the good of his creatures." This is a paradoxical, tragic, and even desperate theological position that Agnon never expressed discursively but allowed to be voiced by secondary characters in his works and to be implied by what befalls his heroes. When I wrote a book on Agnon,
The Silence of Heaven: Agnon
s
Fear of God
, exploring this theme, dozens of religious Jews, most of them from the ultra-Orthodox sector, including youngsters and women and even religious teachers and functionaries, wrote personal letters to me. Some of these letters were veritable confessions. They told me, in their various ways, that they could see in their own souls what I had seen in Agnon. But what I had seen in Agnon's writings I had also glimpsed, for a moment or two, in Mr. Agnon himself, in that sardonic cynicism of his that verged almost on desperate, jesting nihilism. "The Lord will no doubt have mercy on me," he said once, with reference to one of his constant complaints about the bus service, "and if the Lord does not have mercy on me, maybe the Neighborhood Council will, but I fear that the bus cooperative is stronger than both."

I made the pilgrimage to Talpiot two or three more times during the two years I studied at the university in Jerusalem. My first stories were being published then in the weekend supplement of
Davar
and in the quarterly
Keshet
, and I planned to leave them with Mr. Agnon to hear what he thought of them; but Mr. Agnon apologized, saying "I regret that I do not feel up to reading these days," and asked me to bring them back another day. Another day, then, I returned, empty-handed but carrying on my belly, like an embarrassing pregnancy, the number of
Keshet
containing my story. In the end I lacked the courage to give birth there, I was afraid of making a nuisance of myself, and I left his house as I had arrived, with a big belly. Or a bulging sweater. It was only some years later, when the stories were collected in a book (
Where the Jackals Howl
in 1965), that I summoned up the courage to send it to him. For three days and three nights I danced around the kibbutz, drunk with joy, silently singing and roaring aloud with happiness, inwardly roaring and
weeping, after receiving Mr. Agnon's nice letter, in which he wrote,
inter alia
, "...and when we meet, I shall tell you
viva voce
more than I have written here. During Passover I shall read the rest of the stories, God willing, because I enjoy stories like yours where the heroes appear in the full reality of their being."

Once, when I was at the university, an article appeared in a foreign journal by one of the leading lights in comparative literature (perhaps it was by the Swiss Emil Steiger?), who gave it as his opinion that the three most important Central European writers of the first half of the twentieth century were Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and S. Y. Agnon. The article was written several years before Agnon won the Nobel Prize, and I was so excited that I stole the journal from the reading room (there were no photocopiers at the university in those days) and hurried with it to Talpiot to give Agnon the pleasure of reading it. And he was indeed pleased, so much so that he wolfed down the whole article as he stood on the doorstep of his house, in a single breath, before so much as asking me in; after reading it, rereading it, and perhaps even licking his lips, he gave me that look he sometimes gave me and asked innocently: "Do you also think Thomas Mann is such an important writer?"

One night, years later, I missed the last bus back from Rehovot to the kibbutz at Hulda and had to take a taxi. All day long the radio had been talking about the Nobel Prize that had been shared between Agnon and the poet Nellie Sachs, and the taxi driver asked me if I'd ever heard of a writer called, what was it, Egnon. "Think about it," he said in amazement. "We've never heard of him before, and suddenly he gets us into the world finals. Problem is, he ends up tying with some woman."

For several years I endeavored to free myself from Agnon's shadow. I struggled to distance my writing from his influence, his dense, ornamented, sometimes Philistine language, his measured rhythms, a certain midrashic self-satisfaction, a beat of Yiddish tunes, juicy ripples of Hasidic tales. I had to liberate myself from the influence of his sarcasm and wit, his baroque symbolism, his enigmatic labyrinthine games, his double meanings, and his complicated, erudite literary games.

Despite all my efforts to free myself from him, what I have learned from Agnon no doubt still resonates in my writing.

What is it, in fact, that I learned from him?

Perhaps this. To cast more than one shadow. Not to pick the raisins from the cake. To rein in and polish pain. And one other thing, that my grandmother used to say in a sharper way than I have found it expressed by Agnon: "If you have no more tears left to weep, then don't weep. Laugh."

SOMETIMES
I was left with my grandparents for the night. My grandmother used to point suddenly at a piece of furniture or an item of clothing or a person and say to me:

"It's so ugly, it's almost beautiful."

Sometimes she said:

"He's become so clever, he can't understand anything anymore."

Or:

"It hurts so much, it almost makes me laugh."

All day long she hummed tunes to herself that she had brought with her from places where she lived apparently without fear of germs and without the rudeness that she complained also infected everything here.

"Like animals," she would suddenly hiss disgustedly, for no visible reason, with no provocation or connection, without bothering to explain whom she was comparing to animals. Even when I sat next to her on a park bench in the evening, and there was no one in the park, and a slight breeze gently touched the tips of the leaves or perhaps made them tremble without really touching them with its invisible fingertips, Grandma could suddenly erupt, quivering with shocked loathing:

"Really! How could they! Worse than animals!"

A moment later she was humming to herself gentle tunes that were unfamiliar to me.

She was always humming, in the kitchen, in front of the mirror, on her deck chair on the veranda, even in the night.