The Rise of David Levinsky Part 8

As to lodgings, it was deemed most natural that I should sleep in some house of worship, as thousands of Talmud students did in Antomir and other towns.

To put up with a synagogue bench for a bed and to "eat days" was even regarded as a desirable part of a young man's Talmud education. And so I selected a pew in the Preacher's Synagogue for my bed. I was better off than some others who lived in houses of G.o.d, for I had some of my mother's bedding while they mostly had to sleep on hay pillows with a coat for a blanket

It was not until I found myself lying on this improvised bed that I realized the full extent of my calamity. During the first seven days of mourning I had been aware, of course, that something appalling had befallen me, but I had scarcely experienced anything like keen anguish. I had been in an excited, hazy state of mind, more conscious of being the central figure of a great sensation than of my loss. As I went to bed on the synagogue bench, however, instead of in my old bunk at what had been my home, the fact that my mother was dead and would never be alive again smote me with crushing violence. It was as though I had just discovered it. I shall never forget that terrible night

At the end of the first thirty days of mourning I visited mother's grave.

"Mamma! Mamma!" I shrieked, throwing myself upon the mound in a wild paroxysm of grief

The dinners which Reb Sender's wife brought to the synagogue for her husband and myself were never quite enough for two, and for supper, which he had at home, she would bring me some bread and cheese or herring. Poor Reb Sender could not look me in the face. The situation grew more awkward every day. It was not long before his wife began to drop hints that I was hard to please, that she did far more than she could afford for me and that I was an ingrate. The upshot was that she "allowed" me to accept "days"

from other families. But the well-to-do people had by now forgotten my existence and the housewives who were still vying with one another in offering me meals were mostly of the poorer cla.s.s. These strove to make me feel at home at their houses, and yet, in some cases at least, as I ate, I was aware of being watched lest I should consume too much bread. As a consequence, I often went away half hungry. All of which quickened my self-pity and the agony of my yearnings for mother. I grew extremely sensitive and more quarrelsome than I am naturally. I quarreled with one of my relatives, a woman, and rejected the "day" which I had had in her house, and shortly after abandoned one of my other "days."

Reb Sender kept tab of my missing "days" and tried to make up for them by sharing his dinner with me. His wife, however, who usually waited for the dishes and so was present while I ate, was anything but an encouraging witness of her husband's hospitality.

The food would stick in my throat under her glances. I was repeatedly impelled abruptly to leave the meal, but refrained from doing so for Reb Sender's sake. I obtained two new "days." One of these I soon forfeited, having been caught stealing a hunk of bread; but I kept the matter from Reb Sender. To conceal the truth from him I would spend the dinner hour in the street or in a little synagogue in another section of the city. Tidy Naphtali had recently returned to Antomir, and this house of worship was his home now. His vocal cords had been ruined by incessantly reading Talmud at the top of his lungs. He now spoke or read in a low, hoa.r.s.e voice. He still spent most of his time at a reading-desk, but he had to content himself with whispering

I found a new "day," but lost three of my old ones. Naphtali had as little to eat as I, yet he scarcely ever left his books. One late afternoon I sat by his side while he was reading in a spiritless whisper. Neither of us had lunched that day. His curly head was propped upon his arm, his near-sighted eyes close to the book. He never stirred. He was too faint to sway his body or to gesticulate. I was musing wearily, and it seemed as though my hunger was a living thing and was taking part in my thoughts

"Do you know, Naphtali," I said, "it is pleasant even to famish in company.

If I were alone it would be harder to stand it. 'The misery of the many is a consolation.'" He made no answer. Minutes pa.s.sed.

Presently he turned from his desk

"Do you really think there is a G.o.d?" he asked, irrelevantly

I stared

"Don't be shocked. It is all bosh." And he fell to swaying over his book

I was dumfounded. "Why do you keep reading Talmud, then?" I asked, looking aghast

"Because I am a fool," he returned, going on with his reading. A minute later he added, "But you are a bigger one."

I was hurt and horrified. I tried to argue, but he went on murmuring, his eyes on the folio before him

Finally I snapped: "You are a horrid atheist and a sinner in Israel.

You are desecrating the holy place." And I rushed from the little synagogue

His shocking whisper, "Do you really think there is a G.o.d?"

haunted me all that afternoon and evening. He appeared like another man to me. I was burning to see him again and to smash his atheism, to prove to him that there was a G.o.d. But as I made a mental rehearsal of my argument I realized that I had nothing clear or definite to put forth. So I cursed Naphtali for an apostate, registered a vow to shun him, and was looking forward to the following day when I should go to see him again

My interest in the matter was not keen, however, and soon it died down altogether. Nothing really interested me except the fact that I had not enough to eat, that mother was no more, that I was all alone in the world.

The shock of the catastrophe had produced a striking effect on me.

My incessant broodings, and the corroding sense of my great irreparable loss and of my desolation had made a nerveless, listless wreck of me, a mere shadow of my former self. I was incapable of sustained thinking

My communions with G.o.d were quite rare now. Nor did He take as much interest in my studies as He used to. Instead of the Divine Presence shining down on me while I read, the face of my martyred mother would loom before me. Once or twice in my hungry rambles I visited Abner's Court and let my heart be racked by the sight of what had once been our home, mother's and mine. I said prayers for her three times a day with great devotion, with a deep yearning. But this piety was powerless to restore me to my former feeling for the Talmud

I distinctly recall how I would shut my eyes and vision my mother looking at me from her grave, her heart contracted with anguish and pity for her famished orphan. It was an excruciating vision, yet I found comfort in it. I would mutely complain of the world to her. It would give me satisfaction to denounce the whole town to her. "Ah, I have got you!" I seemed to say to the people of Antomir. "The ghost of my mother and the whole Other World see you in all your heartlessness. You can't wriggle out of it." This was my revenge. I reveled in it.

But, nothing daunted, the people of Antomir would go about their business as usual and my heart would sink with a sense of my helplessness.

I was restless. I coveted diversion, company, and I saw a good deal of Naphtali. As for his Free Thought, it soon, after we had two mild quarrels over it, began to bore me. It appeared that the huge tomes of the Talmud were not the only books he read these days.

He spent much time, clandestinely, on little books written in the holy tongue on any but holy topics. They were taken up with such things as modern science, poetry, fiction, and, above all, criticism of our faith. He made some attempts to lure me into an interest in these books, but without avail. The only thing connected with them that appealed to me were the anecdotes that Naphtali would tell me, in his laconic way, concerning their authors. I scarcely ever listened to these stories without invoking imprecations upon the infidels, but I enjoyed them all the same. They were mostly concerned with their apostasy, but there were many that were not.

Some of these, or rather the fact that I had first heard them from Naphtali, in my youth, were destined to have a peculiar bearing on an important event in my life, on something that occurred many years later, when I was already a prosperous merchant in New York. They were about Doctor Rachaeles, a famous Hebrew writer who practised medicine in Odessa, and his son-in-law, a poet named Abraham Tevkin. Doctor Rachaeles's daughter was a celebrated beauty and the poet's courtship of her had been in the form of a long series of pa.s.sionate letters addressed, not to his lady-love, but to her father. This love-story made a strong impression on me. The figures of the beautiful girl and of the enamoured young poet, as I pictured them, were vivid in my mind.

"Did he write of his love in those letters?" I demanded, shyly

"He did not write of onions, did he?" Naphtali retorted. After a little I asked: "But how could she read those letters? She certainly does not read holy tongue?"

"Go ask her."

"You're a funny fellow. Did Tevkin get the girl?"

"He did, and they have been married for many years. Why, did you wonder if you mightn't have a chance?"

"You're impossible, Naphtali."

He smiled.

CHAPTER II

ONE afternoon Naphtali called on me at the Preacher's Synagogue

"Have you got all your 'days'?" he asked, in his whisper

"Why?"

He had discovered a "treasure"--a pious, rich, elderly woman whose latest hobby was to care for at least eighteen poor Talmudists--eighteen being the numerical value of the letters composing the Hebrew word for "life." Her name was Shiphrah Minsker. She belonged to one of the oldest families in Antomir, and her husband was equally well-born. Her religious zeal was of recent origin, in fact, and even now she wore her hair "Gentile fashion." It was a great sin, but she had never worn a wig in her life, and putting on one now seemed to be out of the question.

This hair of hers was of a dark-brown hue, threaded with silver, and it grew in a tousled abundance of unruly wisps that seemed to be symbolic of her harum-scarum character. She was as pugnacious as she was charitable, and as quick to make up a quarrel as to pick one. Her husband, Michael Minsker, was a "worldly" man, with only a smattering of Talmud, and their younger children were being educated at the Russian schools. But they all humored her newly adopted old-fashioned ways, to a certain extent at least, while she tolerated their "Gentile" ones as she did her own uncovered hair. Relegating her household affairs to a devoted old servant, with whom she was forever wrangling, Shiphrah spent most of her time raising contributions to her various charity funds, looking after her Talmud students, quarreling with her numerous friends, and begging their forgiveness. If she was unable to provide meals for a student in the houses of some people of her acquaintance she paid for his board out of her own purse

Her husband was an exporter of grain and his business often took him to Koenigsberg, Prussia, for several weeks at a time.

Occasions of this kind were hailed by Shiphrah as a G.o.dsend (in the literal sense of the term), for in his absence she could freely spend on her beneficiaries and even feed some of them at her own house

When I was introduced to her as "the son of the woman who had been killed on the Horse-market" and she heard that I frequently had nothing to eat, she burst into tears and berated me soundly for not having knocked at her door sooner

"It's terrible! It's terrible!" she moaned, breaking into tears again.

"In fact I, too, deserve a spanking. To think that I did not look him up at once when that awful thing happened!"

As a matter of fact, she had not done so because at the time of my mother's death her house had been agog with a trouble of its own.

But of this presently

She handed me a three-ruble bill and set about filling up the gaps in my eating calendar and subst.i.tuting fat "days" for lean ones.

She often came to see me at the synagogue, never empty-handed.

Now she had a silver coin for me, now a pair of socks, a shirt, or perhaps a pair of trousers which some member of her family had discarded. Often, too, she would bring me a quarter of a chicken, cookies, or some other article of food from her own table