For a little while he stood in the room that Inge had left. Then he turned around and went to the door. He looked about the room, walked out, and shut the door.
The Night
When night fell I went home; that is, I went to the hotel room I had taken for my wife and myself. I was hurrying, as I knew that my wife was tired out by all the travel and wanted to sleep, and I had no intention of disturbing her.
There was a multitude of people in the streets, mainly new immigrants, who were arriving here from all over the world. For many years they had wasted away in the death camps, or wandered aimlessly over hill and valley, and through forests, all this time without seeing so much as the flicker of a candle, and now that they’d stepped from the dark into this sudden brightness, they seemed puzzled and somewhat suspicious, not being able to grasp whether all the lights had been left burning by an oversight, or whether it was part of some scheme of the authorities.
An old man came toward me, wearing a greenish coat that came down to his knees, exactly like the coat Mr. Halbfried, the bookseller in our town, used to wear for as long as I remember. The coat had lost most of its color, but had kept its original shape. Short coats are better at keeping their shape than long ones, because long coats sweep the ground and get frayed, whereas short coats flutter in the air, and the ground cannot harm them in any way. Even though their appearance might have changed, their hems remain as the tailor finished them and seem to have retained their perfection.
While I was wondering whether this was really Mr. Halbfried, he ran his weary eyes over me and said: “From the day that I arrived here I’ve been looking for you, and now that we’ve met I’m happy twice over, once because I’ve found someone from my home town, and twice because that someone happens to be you.” The old man was so excited that he forgot to greet me properly, instead of which he straightway reeled off a string of names, people he’d asked about me, and after each name he’d express his amazement that So-and-so didn’t know me, and had he himself failed to recognize me the moment he saw me, he could have passed me as if we were not fellow townsmen. Having come around to mentioning our town, he began talking about the past, the time when we were neighbors, and his bookstore was filled with books that united all the learned people of the town, who were passing in and out of the shop all day, and having heated discussions about what was going on in the world, and about the future, and coming to the conclusion that the world was evolving into a better place, and there was I, a small boy, fingering the books, climbing the ladder, standing at the top reading, not realizing that I was endangering myself; for had someone blundered into the ladder by mistake, I could very easily have fallen off. But as if the large stock of books which he kept were not sufficient for me, I had asked him to get me The Poem of Jerusalem Liberated. However, he couldn’t remember any more whether he’d placed the order before I emigrated to the Land of Israel, or whether I did so before he’d placed the order.
Another thing he was reminded of, said Mr. Halbfried, was the time they showed my first poems to that old mystic who had written two interpretations of the prayerbook, and the old man had looked at them and murmured, “Kehadin kamtza dilevushe mine uve” [“like the snail whose garb is a part of it”], and the learned listeners tried hard to understand the meaning of these words, and did not succeed. He, Mr. Halbfried continued, was still puzzled that they never took the trouble to look them up in a dictionary, and that he himself did not do so, although he had a number of dictionaries in stock, and could have done so quite easily, yet somehow never did.
He broke off his story and asked me was I angry with his brother? — Why? His brother had just passed us and greeted me, and I made as if I didn’t see him.
Mr. Halbfried’s last words shocked and saddened me. I had not noticed anyone greeting me; as for the man who had passed us, I was under the impression that it was Mr. Halbfried himself. As I didn’t wish him to think that I would turn my eyes away from people who greet me, I said to him: “I swear I didn’t notice your brother; had I noticed him, I would have been the first to greet him.” So Mr. Halbfried began talking once more of the good old days, of his bookshop and the people who came to it. Every time Mr. Halbfried mentioned a name, he did so with great warmth, the way we used to talk about good friends in those long-lost days before the war.
After a while, Mr. Halbfried stopped and said: “I shall leave you now, as I do not want you to keep a man waiting who wishes to see you.” With that he shook my hand and went away.
The man Mr. Halbfried had mentioned was not known to me, nor did he seem to be waiting for me; however, Mr. Halbfried’s mistake came in handy, as it enabled me to shake the old man off politely, and so avoid disturbing my wife’s sleep.
But Mr. Halbfried had not been mistaken; after I’d gotten rid of him, this man barred my way, then poked his stick into the ground and leaned on it with both hands, while looking at me. Then he lifted his hand in greeting, lifted it to his cap, a round cap of sheepskin leather, and while he was doing so, he said: “Don’t you know me?” I said to myself: Why tell him I don’t know him? So I gave him a warm look and said: “Certainly I know you, you’re none other than—” He interrupted me and said: “I was sure you’d know me, if not for my own sake, then for the sake of my son. What do you think of his poems?” From this I realized that he was the father of someone or other who had sent me his book of poems. I said to myself: Why tell him that I haven’t looked at them yet? So I gave him a warm look and said whatever it is one says on these occasions. Yet he didn’t seem satisfied with it. So I said to myself: Why not add a few nice words? So I added a few compliments; but he was still unsatisfied, and began singing his son’s praises himself, and I kept nodding my head in agreement, so that an onlooker would have thought that the praise came from my mouth.
Having done, he said: “No doubt you wish to make my son’s acquaintance, so go to the concert hall, that’s where you’ll find him. My son is a well-loved man, all the doors are open to him, not only the doors of music but the doors of all the important houses in town. Why, if my son desired, let’s say, to ride on a mouse, why, the animal would rush up to him with its tail between its legs and beg him to take a ride. Truly, I myself would love to go to that concert, all the best members of our intelligentsia will be there, the trouble is they won’t let you in if you haven’t got a ticket.” Saying this, he rubbed two fingers together and made a noise with his lips, as if to say, you need real coins for that.
I kept quiet and did not say a word. It was some years now that I hadn’t gone to a concert. I could never understand how a crowd of people could assemble at a fixed date and hour, in a special hall, just to hear some singing. Nor could I understand how it was that the singers were ready to lift up their voices in song at the exact hour the ticket holders were filling the hall, ready to listen.
I’m just a small-town boy; I can grasp that someone is singing because his heart is full; but this singing in front of an audience rich enough to buy tickets, because some impresario organized it all, was beyond me. So when I saw how much this man wanted to go to the concert, I asked myself whether I should help him, and decided to buy him a ticket. He saw what I was thinking, and said, “I won’t go without you.” I asked myself whether to go with him, and then I said, “All right, I’ll buy two tickets, and we’ll go together.” He started feeling the air, as if it were full of tickets. Again he rubbed two fingers together, and made a popping noise, like a cork coming out of a bottle.