“You can’t say I’m not a good housekeeper.”
Indeed, you could not. He kept house for himself and ate from his own table. He was not one of your room-and-boarders who lounge around gabbing all day and are sitting down to supper before they have risen from lunch. Not Hemdat. He came from a well-to-do, bourgeois home in which a day spent in idleness was a day stolen from its Creator.
Hemdat bent his curly head by the flaming stove. The light lent his face a charming flush. Yael stared dreamily at the picture over the table. Apart from its furniture, Hemdat’s room had a portrait by Rembrandt on the wall, a picture of a bride and a groom. Yael saw her reflection in it. “I do believe,” she smiled, “that I can see myself in the picture. It’s a Rembrandt, isn’t it?”
Hemdat nodded. “So it is. It’s a Rembrandt, and it’s called The Bride and Groom.”
Hemdat’s room had no mirror except for the glass frame of the picture. Once, when the fiancée of one of his friends was half in love with him, he had imagined himself as a third person in it. He didn’t have such thoughts any longer. People should be happy with what they had and not crave what belonged to others. Hemdat thought of a friend who once said teasingly:
“You only like Rembrandt because he was a Casanova like yourself.”
Who was that knocking? It was Shoshanna and Mushalam. Hemdat opened the door and said, “Come on in.”
Yael jumped to her feet as if bitten by a snake. “Mr. Hemdat is behaving very oddly,” she said. “He absolutely insisted that I stay for supper. It’s too much for me, really it is.”
She blushed all the way down to her throat and looked away from the table.
Shoshanna and Mushalam had just come back from Petach Tikva, where they had unexpectedly attended their own wedding. What happened was that a cousin of Shoshanna’s had married off his youngest son and decided to make the most of the occasion by marrying off Shoshanna too. She and Mushalam were quite unprepared.
“Mazal tov, mazal tov!” said Hemdat and Yael in one breath. “Mazal tov, mazal tov!” they repeated in loud voices.
Hemdat kept thinking how happy he was for them. Such a story should be written in gold letters on unicorn horn. Shoshanna and Mushalam had come to invite him to their wedding party. Hemdat thanked them kindly but said he was busy. He would gladly come to their golden anniversary. Shoshanna and Mushalam were sorry to hear that but told him in leaving that they loved him anyway.
Yael sat there stunned. Shoshanna’s getting married was a big surprise. Imagine two people, one here and one there, and before you know it they have met somewhere else and are joined for life. They were like the palm tree and the fir tree in the poem by Heine.
Yael was poor at literary comparisons. What did one thing have to do with the other? The tree in Heine’s poem stood yearning at a distance of thousands of miles, while Shoshanna and Mushalam were now a married couple. “Some people,” said Hemdat, gripping the edge of the table, “are under the wedding canopy before they know it and others wait to get there all their lives.”
What had made him say a thing like that? Really, he was beginning to talk nonsense.
2
His friends’ suspicions were groundless. “Yael is a nice looking girl,” they said to him. “It’s no wonder that you’re taken with her.” But Hemdat knew that he was only giving her lessons because he felt sorry for her. The two of them were poles apart, and he had never even touched her. Not that she wasn’t attractive. Her tranquil bearing, fresh complexion, and tall, womanly way she held herself made him feel a kind of respect. And the odd thing was that before getting to know her he hadn’t thought her pretty at all and had even called her “that beefsteak” behind her back.
She arrived one evening soaking wet and limping, her right shoe as full of water as a kneading trough. “It’s raining,” she said, standing in the doorway.
Hemdat brought a chair for her to sit on and took off her shoe. She had a surprisingly delicate foot. “What are you looking at?” she asked, following his glance.
“Excuse me for asking,” he said, as though waking from a dream, “but did you make these socks?”
Yael smiled. “No, they’re from home. But I could have made them.”
Hemdat helped her out of her coat and spread it on the divan. How nice it would have been for there to be a warm stove in the corner and a samovar boiling on the table, so that he could dry out her coat and make her a glass of hot tea. He bent quietly to wring out the bottom of her coat. Yael put on a pair of his slippers, and he said with a smile:
“There’s a belief that if the groom at a wedding makes the bride move her foot with his own, he’ll be the boss. But if she makes him move his, she’ll be.”
Yael laughed. “Oh, my, I’ve gotten mud on you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She brushed off Hemdat’s clothes and went to wash her hands.
He shook his head and said, “You needn’t have bothered.”
The next day he washed without soap. Yael’s fingerprints were on his one bar. He knew he was being silly.
Yael was not a good student. She had managed to learn some writing and a few chapters from the Bible and Part ii of Ben-Ami’s grammar, but that was all. She had neither a quick grasp nor the time for it. Since she worked in the mornings and spent the afternoons with her sick mother at the hospital, she came unprepared to her lessons. Hemdat scolded her good-naturedly and did the best he could, but devoted teacher though he was, he was wasting his time. To think of all the things he could have done with it! Should he tell her he was stopping? But he did not want to stop. Often she came late. Once, when he asked her why, she said that she hated to take him away from his work. Another time she came and found him lying on the divan as though swimming in a sea of sadness.
Hemdat wondered what she saw in him. He knew that she liked him and valued his opinions. Once she even told him that the Bible verse “Your words uphold the stumbler” made her think of him. She had never met anyone like him who always knew the right thing to say. And yet he spoke haltingly. Every phrase began with a sigh and his warm voice was slow and monotonous. What did she see in him?
Yael saw that Hemdat was a poet. Poets took their time when they spoke. Pizmoni was a greater poet than Hemdat, but Bialik was even greater. She loved looking at Bialik when he visited Rehovot. He had worn a velvet jacket and walked with the almond-wood cane that he stood leaning on at the bonfire made in his honor. The whole town had turned out to see him. Not even a baby stayed home. What had he been thinking of? He seemed such a nice man. Yet in his photographs he bit his bottom lip as though annoyed. No two poets were the same. Hemdat bowed his head when he talked and shaded his right eye with his hand. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples to write poetry. Not that she ever had read Schiller. Her father read him all the time. Why did no one read him anymore? Every age had its authors. Now there was Tolstoy and Sanin and Sholom Aleichem. Of course, Sanin was a character in a novel, not an author, but Yael was not a student of literature and had no way of knowing such things. She had her good points, Yael Hayyut, and was certainly very pretty.