Mr. Mani (52 page)

 

In truth, Your Grace has good reason to hold his breath and shut his eyes, fearful in thought and spirit for the story's end ... and no less fearfully, although ever so gently and clandestinely, did the two of us, the murderer and myself, plan to pluck my son from that crowd of celebrants and lead him back home to his bed. But when we stepped up and seized his lantern so as to make him follow us, he took fright and started to flee—and seeing us run after him, the celebrants at once joined in the pursuit. He ran down the long, deserted street of the Tarik Babel-Silseleh with his cloak flapping behind him like a big black bird—or so, from that moment, I began to think of him, an odd bird that must be pinioned before it flew away above our heads. He ran and ran through the cover of snow that made all of Jerusalem look like a single interconnected house, but instead of heading for home, for the quarter of the Jews, and then doubling back through the Middle Synagogue or the synagogue of Yohanan ben-Zakkai, he kept going straight ahead, turning neither left nor right until he came to the Bab, the Gate of the Chain leading up to the great mosque. He shook it a bit until he realized that it was locked, and then, without giving it any thought, as if trusting in the snow to protect him, turned left and proceeded in the same easy, flying, unconcerned lope to the second gate, the Bal-el-Matra, from which he entered the great, deserted square in front of the golden dome, which the snow had covered with a fresh head of white hair. The echoes of his footsteps were still ringing out when he was seized by two sleepy Mohammedan guards. Perhaps they too thought that he was some kind of black bird that had fallen from on high and soon would fly back there, because why else would they have hurried to bind him with long strips of cloth and lay him on the stairs amid the columns, where his squirming shape now made an imprint in the snow?

My master and teacher. Rabbi Shabbetai. My master and teacher. Your Grace. Rabbi Haddaya.
Señor y maestro mío
Shabbetai Hananiah. Hananiah Shabbetai.
Su merced ...
can it be?

 

In no time he was surrounded, because the news spread quickly from gate to gate across that huge deserted square, from the golden dome to the silver dome, so that soon more sleepy guards appeared, although this time there was no telling what time of sleep my son had roused them from. They crowded about him and bent over him to read in his eyes the mad chastisements that he planned for them and that he was begging them to inflict now on himself so that he might demonstrate how he was the first to awaken and recollect his true nature. And although the guards could see for themselves that the man in the cloak spread out in the snow on the steps was an infirm soul, they did not, simple beings that they were, give credence to this soul's suffering but rather suspected it of taking pleasure in itself and its delusions and sought to share that pleasure with it, so that they began to make sport of it and roll it in the snow, a glitter marking the passage of a half-concealed knife from hand to hand. And I, my master and teacher, was outside the gate, I was watching from afar while listening to the distant bell of a lost flock, silently, wretchedly waiting for the worst of the night to wear itself out and the morning star to appear in the east, faint and longed-for, so that I might go to him, to the far pole of his terror and sorrow, whether as his slaughterer or whether as the slaughterer's inspector, and release him from his earthly bonds, because I was certain that he had already deposited his seed...

 

You have become,
señor y maestro mío,
most silent. Can it be that you are already gone?

 

Wait! I want to come too, Rabbi Shabbetai Hananiah ... Why don't you answer me?...For the love of God, answer me...

 

‘Twould take but a nod...

‘Tis not as if I need words to understand ...

 

In truth ...

 

Is it self-murder, then?

 

Yes? ... No?...

Supplements

 

AVRAHAM MANI
received no answer to his question, nor was there the least movement of the rabbi's head for him to interpret as a yes or a no; indeed, at this stage of the conversation, even he, as agitated and carried away as he was, had to admit that Rabbi Shabbetai Haddaya, whose judgment he had sought, was dead. There was no way of knowing exactly when the rabbi had breathed his last, and although often, in the years to come, he sought to go over those last minutes in his mind, even staging them there by playing both roles, his own and that of his teacher, he was unable to decide when the moment of death had occurred. In any event, he remembered well his desperate, bizarre, and persistent attempts to resuscitate the rabbi, which were accompanied by loud, angry bangs on the locked door that was finally broken in. Once a local doctor was fetched and the rabbi's death officially announced, a great wave of emotion swept over the Jews of Athens. While Rabbi Haddaya's death had been more or less expected, those ministering to him, and especially Dona Flora, felt no sense of relief, for during the forty days they had been tending him they somehow had come to believe that he might remain as he was for many years. Naturally, an accusing finger was pointed at Avraham Mani, who served as the target of angry words and hostile looks, it being felt that his stubborn insistence on remaining by the bedside, where he cried and behaved unrestrainedly, had brought on the old man's death. Avraham Mani himself, however, was too absorbed in his own private mourning to be perturbed by these accusations, and especially, in the dilemma that continued to haunt him of whether or not to take his life and of the effect such an action might have on his share in the World to Come.

Be that as it may, though, Avraham Mani made himself a central figure at the funeral and during the week of mourning that followed. Although he was not a blood relation of the departed, he slashed his clothing, said the mourner's prayer by the grave in a loud, ceremonious voice, and spent the week of mourning sitting on a cushion at Madame Flora's feet as though he were a member of the family. He seemed to enjoy the many condolence calls, which included visits by Greek and Turkish religious and political dignitaries who came all the way from Salonika and Constantinople, and—since he was the only one present to have known the deceased from as far back as the Napoleonic wars in Russia—he dominated the conversation with his stories and anecdotes about Rabbi Haddaya.

Following the first month-day of the death, when Dona Flora began to pack her things, Avraham Mani considered proposing marriage to her, both as a way of “doing what the old man had always wanted,” as he thought of putting it to her, and of making up for his original rejection. In the end, however, Dona Flora was so chillingly aloof toward him that he dared not even hint at the matter. She, for her part, apprehensive that he would follow her to Constantinople, decided at the last minute to set out for Palestine and visit her niece and her niece's baby, whom Mani's stories had made her greatly desirous of seeing.

Fearful that the secret of his paternity might be revealed and place him in an impossible position in Jerusalem, Avraham Mani did not follow her there. Reluctantly, he returned to Salonika and to his daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons, still preoccupied with the thought of suicide and with various possibilities of carrying it out. Meanwhile, he comported himself as a mourner and went from synagogue to synagogue to tell of the rabbi's death. He especially liked to mount the podium on the Sabbath when the Torah scrolls were being taken out of the Holy Ark, give the prayer book a loud clap that brought the congregation to its feet, and compel the cantor to sing the special requiem for distinguished souls, which begins with the verses: “Whence then cometh wisdom, and where is the place of understanding? Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. Oh, how great is Thy goodness that Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee; which Thou has wrought for them that trust in Thee before the sons of men.”

Yet not even these dramatic ceremonies were able to soothe his soul or to give it respite from the question of whether to take his life for his sin. In the end, he decided to wander in the footsteps of his master, seeking, in his words, “to fulfil his unfulfilled disappearance.” In 1853 he set out for Damascus, from where he sent a brief missive to his five-year-old son-grandson with a
conacero
he had written himself, which was full of obscure allusions. But he found no peace in Damascus either, and after the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853, he journeyed onward to Mesopotamia until he reached the region where his grandfather had been born. The last known Jews he lived among, word from whom eventually got back to his daughter and son-in-law in Salonika, were those of a small town called Dahaman, near Midshakar, an ancient port that had been silted in over time and was now no longer near the sea. Avraham Mani served as a rabbi-cantor there and died—from natural causes, it would seem—in 1860, the year of Herzl's birth, or in 1861, the year of the start of the American Civil War. He was sixty-one or sixty-two at the time.

 

FLORA MOLKHO-HADDAYA
was deeply shocked by the death of her husband Rabbi Haddaya. Despite his paralyzing stroke, his loss of speech, and the difficulties imposed by their extended stay in an inn in Athens, the childless Dona Flora derived a special pleasure from caring for her distinguished invalid of a husband, who had become, as Avraham Mani accurately put it, “a venerable babe.” When she and the Greek servant broke down the locked door and found Mani cavorting around the rabbi's dead body, she burst into uncontrollable tears and screams and fell upon Mani in a fury. She quickly got a grip on herself, however, and retained her aristocratic bearing through the period of mourning, even behaving with restraint toward Mani himself out of respect for her late husband. As soon as the month-day ceremony was over, though, she resolved to have no more to do with him and set out for Palestine in order to visit her niece Tamara and Tamara's baby boy.

Doña Flora arrived in Jerusalem in the spring of 1849 after having been away from the city for eighteen years, and was received with great warmth and honor. She moved into her parents' old apartment, in which she was given back her childhood bed, and became little Moshe's “second grandmother,” as he called her. The British consul and his wife, who had recently inaugurated the new Christ's Church in a lavish ceremony, were quick to see that the distinguished doña, “Yosefs aunt,” had much to recommend her and grew to be very fond of her. They even invited her to a soirée of the Jerusalem Bibliophile Society for a discussion of the newly published novel
David Copperfield,
although her English was all but nonexistent.

Tamara, of course, did not reveal to her aunt the true identity of her son's father, and Doña Flora felt happy to be back in her native city and country. She even consulted several of her acquaintances about the possibility of transferring her late husband's remains from Athens to Jerusalem and publicly reburying them on the Mount of Olives. But in 1853, during the Crimean War, a letter written by Avraham Mani arrived from Damascus with a poem for his grandson that contained several oddly phrased hints that Mani might soon come to Jerusalem. Tamara was gripped by great anxiety and emotion, and after much soul-searching and many excruciating nights of insomnia, she broke down and confided her secret to her beloved aunt. Doña Flora was horrified. Although at first she seemed to make her peace with her niece's confession, she gradually developed a strange revulsion for her surroundings, including Jerusalem and Palestine themselves. In 1855, following an earthquake in the city and riots between Greeks and Armenians in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and after taking part in the dedication of a new trade school for Jews established by the British consul in an uninhabited area outside the walled city that would one day become the neighbor of Abraham's Vineyard, she left Jerusalem for Alexandria, where her late father Ya'akov Molkho had cousins. She settled down there, lapsed into a prolonged melancholia, and died in Egypt in 1863 at the age of sixty-three.

 

There was no way of knowing exactly when
RABBI SHABBETAI HANANIAH HADDAYA
died or for how long Avraham Mani had been talking to a corpse. Nor was it clear how avoidable the death was. True, a local Greek physician, who had been brought for a consultation soon after Rabbi Haddaya's arrival at the inn in Athens in the autumn of 1848, told Doña Flora that he personally knew several aphasic victims of strokes in the Pallaka quarter near the Acropolis who had lived to a ripe old age, but this was in all likelihood an overly optimistic prognosis. At the same time, it was not inconceivable that the rabbi's death was hastened by the excitement of Avraham Mani's sudden appearance. Was he still alive when his old pupil, the “little
pisgado,
” asked his final question? Did he attempt to rack his failing brain for a rabbinical ruling on the permissibility of suicide in such a case? And again: was his death foreordained, or could it have been prevented? There can be no definite answer to any of these questions. Certainly, Rabbi Haddaya was greatly frightened when Doña Flora left the room and Avraham Mani locked the door behind her and launched into a long harangue, in the course of which he took off the rabbi's clothes and removed his diapers. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that the Jews who broke down the locked door and found Mr. Mani dancing and singing before a naked corpse that he was trying to revive were extremely angry at him, even though they never doubted he meant well.

ELIYAHU MANI (1740–1807)

YOSEF MANI (1776–1820)

AVRAHAM MANI (1799–1861)

YOSEF MANI (1826–1847)

MOSHE MANI (1848–1899)

YOSEF MANI (1887–1941)