Simon Eichelkatz; The Patriarch Part 7

This morning I received a remarkable epistle from my mother. Its tone is very different from what I am accustomed to in her. As a rule she avoids all interference with my private affairs; and now, all at once, she writes, she doesn't think it proper that I cut myself off, as I do, from all intercourse, and open up no relations whatsoever with the prominent members of the community. She goes on to say that she has learned from trustworthy sources that very fine and cultivated families live in Reissnitz, who would esteem it a pleasure to see me in their homes, and who are probably hurt even now that I do not introduce myself to them.

She remarks that I am not intimate even with my colleagues, who would be justified in making a claim upon me. In the house of Sanitatsrat Ehrlich I would surely find the stimulus and the diversion I undoubtedly need after a severe day's work in the practice of my difficult profession. It is always a dubious matter for a bachelor to isolate himself; he develops peculiar ideas and habits, and acquires the manners of a social hermit. Who, she'd like to know, is a certain Simon Eichelkatz, to whom I devote all my spare time? Besides, it is necessary for a physician to marry--in order to inspire confidence, for the sake of appearances. I had hesitated too long; as Kreisphysikus I should have had a wife long ago; why, the very fact of being Kreisphysikus presupposes an age not exactly youthful.

I reflected a moment--she was right for three reasons. My thirty-eight years actually do make me seem old to myself. In fact, I am old; and it now occurs to me all of a sudden that I may have failed to make use of the psychological moment to seek and find my affinity. And if I never marry? Is marriage so unqualifiedly desirable? I thought of Simon Eichelkatz. But how did my mother come to hear of him? I didn't recall having mentioned him in my letters to her. As for the other points on which she touched? Ah! A flash of inspiration! Herr Jonas Goldstucker!

There it stood black on white! A very reliable gentleman had approached her in a matter referring to me, calling for discretion, etc., etc. Now, the merits of Fraulein Edith Ehrlich were known in Rawitsch also. I had to laugh; but I determined at all events to interrogate my old friend about the persons in question.

I went to him in the evening. Though he sat near the stove, with a blanket spread over his knees, he still seemed to suffer from the cold.

He also seemed tired and not so fresh as a few days before. He responded to my questioning look with:

"It's cold, Herr Kreisphysikus; a bad time for old people. Inside nothing to warm you; outside the cold! It chills you to the marrow!" He rubbed his hands and drew the blanket up. Feiwel Silbermann had stepped in, looked at him anxiously without his noticing it, and then put some more coal in the stove.

"We keep up good fires here in Upper Silesia," said Simon, "but what's the use when you begin to freeze inside?"

There was a touch of melancholy in his voice. I laughed and said:

"Feiwel will heat you inside, too."

Then I ordered hot tea and rum for him at once; and a gla.s.s of mulled wine every morning during the cold weather.

I was well aware that this prescription would be of little avail; there are no remedies to counteract such symptoms of old age. But he could be given some relief; and after taking the warm drink he felt more comfortable for the moment.

"It's a remarkable thing, Herr Doktor, that man grows into a block of ice, when his time comes. He doesn't die, but he freezes. Just as outside in nature everything stiffens with the frost when the time comes; and all life dies, because the sun is gone, the great warmth.

What curdles in us, is the warm current of life, the blood. No herb grows which can prevent it. Forgive me, Herr Kreisphysikus, for speaking to you so openly. But at my age you don't make beans about things any more, and you think all sorts of thoughts--about life and death. And I've always found you a sensible man, to whom I can say anything at all; and if I now say to you: when the long winter comes upon men, nothing will help them, no doctor, no tea, and no mulled wine, you won't take offense, will you?"

"But spring follows winter," I said more to quiet him than out of conviction. He may have felt this, because he smiled mournfully, and his faded features were suffused with a glorified light--the light that fills us with the awe of the infinite when we stand in the presence of the dead.

"What that spring is which follows the winter of our lives, no man knows. I think it is an eternal winter; and if a new life does blossom out of the grave, it is a fresh beginning, which grows from itself, and does not join on to an end without an end." He gazed meditatively into s.p.a.ce. "My idea is," he continued, "that death is the only reality on earth. Life is only a seeming. Life changes at every moment and pa.s.ses, death never changes and remains forever. Tell me, Herr Kreisphysikus, if men grow old, they live seventy years or a little more, and don't they stay dead a million years? Have you ever heard of anyone's living twice, or being young twice?"

It is not the first time I am called upon to notice the profundity of the old man's observations; but it never fails to surprise me.

"Have you never heard of the immortality of the soul, Herr Eichelkatz?"

I asked.

"Soul, Herr Doktor? What is soul? Where is it? In what is it? How does it look? Does it fly out of the body when life is at an end? By the window? By the chimney? Through the keyhole? Has anyone ever seen it?

Has someone ever felt it? Sometimes I read in the paper about spirits with whom chosen mortals talk. Do you believe it, Herr Doktor? I don't.

Has such a thing ever been proved? They are meshugge or else cheats; it always turns out that way."

I had to laugh at the curt way in which he disposed of spiritualism and all its excrescences.

"Nevertheless, my dear friend," I answered, "there is probably a spiritual after-life which manifests itself in our children and grandchildren--a young spring time of life made fruitful by the impulses of our souls."

He wrapped himself more tightly in his cover. A slight shiver went through his body.

"Herr Kreisphysikus, and how about those who have no children, or those whose children go away from them, or those who do not know their own children?--through no fault of their own. Why should they be worse off than the others? What have they done that they should be extinguished forever, while the others live on forever? I don't believe it. For if I did happen to see in the world a great deal about which I had to ask myself why, still I didn't see anything that had no definite plan and no compelling cause, the good and the bad. The thing might not have pleased me, and it might have seemed bad or false, but it had a law according to which it had to be carried out."

There he was dealing with Kantian abstractions again; the categorical imperative came to him instinctively. I did not want to tire him with thinking too much, and I said:

"By the way, Herr Eichelkatz, I wanted to ask you something that is of personal interest to me. Who is Herr Jonas Goldstucker?"

He looked at me slyly.

"Are you trying to provide for a spiritual after-life, which will manifest itself in your children and grandchildren?" He repeated my words with a touch of irony in the intonation. "And Herr Jonas Goldstucker is to help you on to immortality?"

"We haven't reached that point yet, Herr Eichelkatz," I answered laughing, rejoiced that I had made him think of other things. Without his noticing it, I turned the conversation upon my colleagues in the place, especially Sanitatsrat Ehrlich.

"I don't know the people of to-day very well, Herr Kreisphysikus. Since I gave up my business I haven't bothered myself much about them. The present Sanitatsrat Ehrlich is the son of the Sanitatsrat Ehrlich who was one of the trustees along with Dr. Krakauer. He studied at the same time as my son. And when Ehrlich had finished his course, he established himself here and took up his father's practice. He married and reached a position of prominence and wealth in the same place as his father, who has been dead ten years. If that's what you mean by after-life, Herr Doktor, then the old Sanitatsrat Ehrlich actually does live on in his son. They say the son uses the very same prescriptions as his father.

He's not a shining light; but he's a fine, respected man. I believe in time he was made trustee, like his father; and he has children, sons and daughters, who are a satisfaction to him. His oldest son is also studying medicine, and will probably some time take up his father's prescriptions and his practice. The old Sanitatsrat Ehrlich was no shining light, and neither is his son, and I don't know the young one at all--but, at any rate, their light burns a long time, like a _Yom Kippur_ light, and in the Khille it may be said of this family: _Ehrlich wahrt am langsten_."

He smiled, and was pleased at his own little joke, and I for my part was glad to have left him in a better mood than I had found him.

NOVEMBER 18.

My old friend grows perceptibly weaker. There are no symptoms of a definite trouble but _senectus morbus ipsa_. The nasty cold penetrates the c.h.i.n.ks at door and window and settles in some corner of the room, however carefully warmed and provided against weather. The very time of year prepares mischief for an old, decaying body. If Simon were sitting in some sunny spot, who knows if his seventy-eight years would be oppressing him so? What remarkable old people I saw in the south, especially in Rome. They bore their eighty or ninety years with proud dignity and fine carriage. We of the north age much more rapidly; perhaps we are not even born young. Especially we Jews! Conditions have been bettered in the course of time, since our young people have been allowed to benefit by the sanitary, hygienic, and aesthetic achievements of modern life. They all devote themselves to sports, and the obligation to serve in the army has forced them--and the need therefor is highly significant--to practice gymnastic exercises to their advantage.

Nevertheless they have something old, thoughtful, worldly-wise in their souls. It is the heritage of the many thousands of years of culture, the culture which has won us renown and singled us out among the nations, but has burdened us also and weighted us down with the over-thoughtfulness born of limitless life-experience. _Navete_ and an easy mode of existence we have lost through this heritage; and that it manifests itself especially in spiritual matters is praiseworthy, though neither gratifying nor exhilarating. How difficult we are! How dependent upon tradition! What deep roots we have struck in the soil of the past! I believe we drag the chains of our long history more painfully than those put upon us by the other nations. And though these chains are wrought of the gold of fidelity and linked with the pearls of wisdom, they weight us down--they weight us down in a world where we are only tolerated--strangers!

Simon Eichelkatz awakened these thoughts in me. Yesterday he told me a great deal again. Remarkable! It is as though he felt the need to unburden his soul of a few more matters before he sinks into the great, eternal silence. But he doesn't suspect my anxiety in his behalf. He chats on heedlessly into the twilight of the early winter evenings. The twilight makes people communicative and confidential. It is the time of intimate secrets. And at such a time Simon acquainted me with the most solemn experience of his life.

"I do not know, Herr Kreisphysikus, how to tell you--when I found it out, I felt a pain as though a piece of my body were being torn away. It hurt! My, how it hurt! I cried aloud! I made a rent in my coat; I threw myself on the ground, and I sat _Shiveh_. My son was dead, my only child! Madame Eichelkatz said nothing. She remained immovable. Not a sound pa.s.sed her lips; and to this day I do not know what she thought or felt when the news came that our only child had been--baptized! He had had himself _baptized_, Herr Kreisphysikusleben. Converted! Stepped from one religion into another as lightly as though stepping from the middle of the street over the gutter onto the pavement! From the painful, dusty road to the elegant, smoothly-paved street!

"'What have you to say to this?' I screamed at my wife. But she said nothing. And she raised no objections when after the Shiveh I declared my intention of giving up the business, because, not having a child any more, I did not know for whom to work. She quietly let me do whatever I decided on in my pain and anger. She seemed entirely broken. But no one learned whether from surprise, grief, or repentance. She faded away, and two years after the terrible event she died from no special sickness.

'As a punishment,' the people said, 'of a broken heart'--who knows what goes on in the soul of such a woman!

"I did not know. And that's where I was wrong in the matter. I know it now. And it's a pity, Herr Kreisphysikus, that you never know at the right time. You are never clever, you never understand, you never do the right thing at the right time. It always comes when it's too late."

He paused in his confidences, somewhat hastily uttered, and looked gloomily into s.p.a.ce. Then, as though he had suddenly gathered together his inner forces, he added:

"And yet, when I think it over carefully, it's probably not such a pity.

It must be so and can't be different, because to err is human. And it's only by way of error that you arrive at knowledge. In man error is life.

When he knows everything, more than he likes to know, then comes death."

Error is life, and knowledge is death! The soul of this old man comprehends everything. Philosophers and poets--he never read a line of their works, scarcely a name of theirs reaches his ear, and yet their finest thoughts are crystallized in his observations. And again, for after a little pause he said:

"Death, what is it, Herr Kreisphysikus? Something else that no one knows, surely doesn't know--forgive me, Herr Kreisphysikus, you, too--although you've studied about life and death--and you're a fine, learned man, a serious, learned man--I know, I know. If anyone could have learned about death you certainly would have--but can one learn the eternal riddles of nature? Who knows her secrets? The greatest learning can't penetrate to them. Do me a favor, Herr Kreisphysikus, if there _is_ anyone who knows, tell me; I'd be happy to learn one more thing, before I lay myself down and become a dead man, as now I am a live man."

A startling thought flashed through my mind; but before I could answer him, he said, almost hastily:

"I knew it, Herr Kreisphysikus; you can't tell me. Why? Because there's not a soul who could have discovered it--n.o.body knows what--we don't know anything."

_Ignorabimus!_

Ay, there's the rub. The thought has given pause to many another besides Simon Eichelkatz!

But now I was determined to give expression to the thought which a moment before had flashed through my mind.

"That's not so easily disposed of as you think, Herr Eichelkatz. We know as little as you say, and yet we know so much! When the inscrutable fails to yield us anything positive, when the exact sciences can tell us no more, then comes the work of hypothesis, of thought."

He looked at me with great, astonished eyes. A light of comprehension spread over his face, although he softly said:

"That's too much for me, Herr Kreisphysikus, what you are saying--I mean the way you say it--I think I can understand your meaning; and as for the exact sciences, I can imagine what that means, I have heard the words before. But the other word, poth--pothe--it can't come from apothecary? What you mean is that when we don't know about something, others come and try to explain it from what they have thought over the matter for themselves."