First of all, I had breakfast, of course. It would be wrong to study on an empty stomach. But my desire to learn Hebrew was even less when my stomach was full. I sat down on a chair with the prayer book in my hands by Grandma’s favorite window and, looking closely at the dancing marks, repeated their sound in a whisper. I naturally stumbled on one of the syllables, and at that point my laziness grew to such an extent that… Ah, the day was long, I could do it later. Should I go see Yura? To hell with him. He could have checked on me himself. He must have been studying. Should I go to the yard? But the day was so overcast, gray and cold. Rain was beating against the windowpane. It was so quiet in the yard, so empty…
I was used to Grandpa’s yard being full of sounds year round. Now Grandma Lisa called to someone, then Yura teased Jack, and Jack barked at him, now Robert either complained about something or he and Yura swore at each other… Doors creaked, water hissed and jets sprayed from the hose. Metal roofs creaked from the heat, a rooster “screamed,” sparrows chirped, turtledoves cooed, innumerable insects buzzed, apricots and apples fell off the trees with a thud. It seemed there was nothing in the yard that didn’t produce some kind of sound. All those sounds were interwoven into a melody that existed all by itself. That melody penetrated my being, giving my soul what it needed most – the feeling that everything was fine, that life was beautiful. And the smells of the buds on the trees and shrubs, of grass, flowers, fruit, newly watered vegetable beds, the overheated roof, of falling leaves in autumn, snow in winter – they all mingled cozily with the smells of the houses and the aromas of Grandma’s cooking. And the colors! It’s impossible to enumerate them for many of them don’t even have names, and all the hues and shades of the trees, flowers, fruits and sky, glistening from spring to late autumn.
“Where is all that? Where has it all gone?” I thought, looking through the foggy window covered with drops of rain at my favorite yard. It looked as if it weren’t alive. Why? Because these autumn days were so cold and rainy? No… Hadn’t Yura and I felt nice and happy on similar dreary days? How we had loved to rake fallen leaves together… And now they lay like a motley carpet all over the yard, getting wet, and nobody swept them up. We used to rake them into piles and set fire to them. How wonderfully they had burned when the weather was dry! What heat they emitted! If it drizzled, they gave off smoke. We used to sit by the biggest pile, inhaling the smell of the smoldering leaves, which was unlike anything else. It might have smelled acrid to someone else, but we didn’t think so. Once we even made an Indian pipe, stuffed it with dry leaves and smoked it. We coughed, and smoke almost came out our ears, but we felt really fine.
Yes, the leaves were still here, but the yard was lifeless. “Perhaps I felt that way because Yura was gone,” I thought sadly. Robert had moved out. There was no one for Grandma Lisa to quarrel with, to instruct, to supervise… She was bored and she quieted down. And the yard quieted down too. “Yes, of course, that’s what the matter is,” I thought. But still, this thought, not yet clear, didn’t give me peace of mind. Why did it worry me? I brushed it away like a fly.
I got up and picked up the prayer book Grampa used to teach me to read and set it in its place in the old cupboard.
I had loved that beautiful old cupboard since I was a little child. You opened its doors, and they didn’t creak but rather played a soft tune, their own tune, which was more pleasant and expressive than, say, the creaking of chairs. Besides, the cupboard also had its own very pleasant smell. I thought that was how a very old tree must smell.
Grandma kept Passover dishes in the cupboard. Where the upper part rested on the lower part, between its legs there was a deep niche in which Grandpa’s prayer books, siddurim, were lined up in a row. There were about ten of them.
On the day we started our Hebrew lessons, Grandpa told me to look in the cupboard for the prayer book that contained the Hebrew alphabet and the Russian transcription. I don’t believe that I had ever taken anything out of the niche before that day. And now, as I looked into it, I felt that it was from there that the smell that had tickled my nostrils for many years was coming. Yes, that smell came from the books. Some of Grandpa’s prayer books were ancient, turned yellow over time, swollen from being leafed through. Some of the pages were even cracked – they printed books on thick paper in the old days. The prayer book I got out of the cupboard was published in 1905. I raised it to my nose and inhaled the bitter-sweet, slightly acrid smell of the old book with pleasure. “It’s so old,” I thought, “it was practically printed in the last century.”
At that time, 1905 seemed like ancient times to me.
It may seem strange, but it was exactly during those days that my love for old books arose. It’s strange because I gave up Hebrew after a short time, and I never learned how to read a prayer book. But I liked to hold those books in my hands, to leaf through their yellow pages, to inhale their smell, and to think of how many hands had leafed through them, how many eyes had read them. Those people were long gone, but the books were still here…
That’s when it became a habit with me, and it has remained with me my whole life: as soon as I come across a book, the first thing I do is check when it was published. And that habit gave rise to many other ones. No, not really habits but feelings that I truly treasured.
When I pick up an old book that has been on the shelf for God-knows-how long, or rather “lived” there seems more accurate, it seems to me that the time it has spent there has served a purpose. It has been leaving its mark on every page, every line. Typographic marks, words, phrases haven’t changed, but the book itself has. It’s been gaining its history…
A book cannot relate it; one must know how to feel it. We read this book differently from the way it was read by people in the distant times when it was written, not only because we are different but also because it looks somewhat special, smells somewhat special. Its pages rustle in a special way when we leaf through them… because it has its own unique history…
I don’t know how it affects other people, but I consider a very old book published long ago to be a wise living being. I read it with delight and go into it deeper than I would into the same book by the same author if it were reprinted today…
I hung around the cupboard for quite a long time. I inhaled the smell of the books, daydreamed. I didn’t want to go to the yard with its dreary dampness, but Grandma Lisa sent me on some household errands to Aunt Tamara’s. It was good she did that – the melancholy of the autumn day vanished. Yasha-Ahun and I listened to the Italian singer Rafael for a long time. We even sang along with him.
“Vide lafevide bezdemo-o-o!” we yelled at the top of our lungs, drowning out Rafael himself. Those words, that tune, turned us into lunatics, as if possessed. We could spin Rafael’s phonograph records a hundred times.
In the evening, as I was entering the yard, the gate creaked, Jack barked, welcoming me back home. Grandma was feeding the hens and yelling angrily at the rooster. There were sounds in the yard, there definitely were sounds, almost the same as the ones before, and it smelled of fallen leaves and food from the kitchen. I was deaf and indifferent. “No, it’s not the yard that has changed, it’s me… Something’s happened to me,” I thought, and I suddenly became afraid of something.
You part with your childhood gradually, without noticing it. But if all of a sudden you notice it, you grow sad, and a little bit frightened, and… happy? excited? anxious?