Читать книгу Voyage into Savage Europe - Avigdor Hameiri - Страница 13

Chapter 1

Drama

The crew order those escorting passengers on board to disembark as quickly as possible.

A young woman stands at the top of the gangplank, embracing the husband and love of her youth, whispering:

“My Avraham, you know that without you, life would have no meaning for me, here or anywhere else in this wide world. But now Europe is calling you. What will I do without you, Avraham? Europe is calling.—I’ll die without you if you don’t return. You’re an independent male—and Europe is calling you; but I’m just a helpless female, who must remain behind.”

“Stupid girl! Two things guarantee my return: you, and the homeland.”

“But you’re a male. It’s so much easier for you than I, a woman alone.”

“The homeland and you, the only woman for me.”

A Jew—one of the latecomers—impetuously separates the two.

“Homeland, shmomeland—he grumbles stupidly, as if having participated in the pair’s intimate conversation, angrily tossing his possessions onto the deck.¹

“What a dear, wonderful homeland this is! Homeland? Hmpf!—It’s a human zoo! Homeland? Pfui!” He mumbles fiddling with his things, finally disappearing with them into one of the lower cabins.

The ship begins to move—everyone is on deck to watch it depart. The ship is full. Dozens of people stand, eyes glued to the disappearing shore. In the beginning conversation is animated, but it gradually becomes fitful and, after a while, dies down altogether.

Silence is broken only by the creaking of lifeboats on deck and rolling of the sea, which the prow of the ship proudly bisects into two channels of flowing water.

In the midst of this pregnant silence—a hum of voices: at first soft, and then ever louder. The sound augments and sweetens the beauty of the still, small voice of silence:²

“Our hope is not yet lost.”³

As if out of the ether, “Hatikvah” emerges spontaneously from individual throats.

Suddenly the impetuous Jew appears on deck from his cabin lair.

Ostrich-like, he takes his head out of the ground.

He looks at the other passengers with scornful astonishment.

He shrugs his shoulders.

Face dripping with distaste, he introduces a discordant note into the harmony:

“What kind of song is this?—All this business of ‘Hatikvah’! Sentimental claptrap! Pfui!”

This grating dissonance, which cuts like a razor, angers everyone.

No one asks the man why he has thrown acid into their gentle, sentimental souls. But, after an hour has passed, a broad-shouldered Jewish pioneer comes up to him.⁴ He asks drily:

“Where are you descending to?”⁵

“Descending?”—The man is surprised—“why descending?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m asking. Don’t you know that one “ascends” when immigrating to the Land of Israel, and “descends” when leaving Israel for other countries?”

The Jew looks at him for a moment:

“I have already descended to the land of Israel”—he points with his head to the shore, which has by now almost completely disappeared. “It’s impossible to descend any lower, after the Land of Israel.” He concludes with contempt, even hate.

A second pioneer, leaner than the first and skinny-faced, remarks shrewdly:—“You obviously have a natural-born sense of humor. You have shown us that one can go up and down at the same time!”

“That is a difficult statement that needs a Rambam to expound it,” the Jew says, half-confusedly.⁶

The pioneer replies: “You descended from the Land of Israel when you ascended the ship, don’t you know? What kind of descent was that, to slap a curse in the middle of ‘Hatikvah’? You are apparently unmusical, sir.”

The usual argument begins—erupts is more accurate– about political, economic, and societal issues in the Land of Israel—the economy and the various parties: revisionists, universalists, anarchists, socialists, workers, even fascists and Hitlerites. Also, the country’s rich contributions to world culture and science. All the while, the “descending” Jew remains ensconced on his Olympian height, above any discussion of political party. He curses and excoriates the Land of Israel with bell, book, candle, and fathomless bitterness. Luckily for the Land of Israel, the heavens intervene, cutting the argument off in mid-quarrel. The ship’s yawing makes everyone more concerned about not falling than political arguments. During this interval, the shore—to which everyone’s eyes have been glued—slowly disappears from sight. Gradually, a shipboard play develops: a sentimental drama, dramatis personae of three, with the remaining passengers faithful spectators.

The hero of the piece is the impetuous Jew, whose task it is to pour scorn and ridicule on Palestine.

The second character, the broad-shouldered pioneer, heroically defends his homeland’s troubles, promissory notes, and implementation of its extended, intrusive bureaucracy.

The skinny-faced youth is the drama’s comedian, who prevents the complicated situation from turning into tragedy. He is helped by the natural elements: the tossing of the sea, and everyone’s often-comical attempts to avoid falling over.

In a very short time, the drama changes into pure farce. The hero starts to stare at the rapidly disappearing shoreline—the more “filthy Palestine” disappears into the distance, the more his terrible judgment of it changes, first to apology, then compassion, and finally to defense. The change is aided by biblical quotes Firstly, the classic complaint:

“You have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”⁷

Upon his saying this, a storm breaks out, emphasizing the words of the skinny-faced young man:

“Give us something as sweet as honey! Give us honey!”⁸

When the city begins to disappear into the mist, the angry Jew is reduced to words of submission:

“Why do you complain to me?”—“Look! Look! Soon they will stone me!”⁹

The argument concentrates on the skinny-faced man’s words:

“No one is quarreling with you, sir. We just wanted to test ‘if the Lord is amongst us or not’”¹⁰

When the city disappears from the horizon completely, the impetuous Jew’s face is lit up with a happy-sad smile, which does him credit:

“It makes no difference. We are now at the creation question: ‘whether a country can be born in a day or a nation in a moment?!’¹¹ Is that not so? I have lost more than 10,000 lira in that country! That’s a lot of money, correct? Now I am going to ‘try to make a living elsewhere,’¹² as it is said: ‘Go down there and buy some (provisions) for us, so that we may live and not die.’¹³ I still have some possessions ‘there,’—I know what to do now—once bitten, twice shy, after all.—God will help me, so that I may fulfil what is written: ‘You will know that it was the Lord when He gives you meat to eat in the evening and all the bread you want in the morning.’”¹⁴

The Jew seasons the events of his past life, and his future hopes, with Biblical passages of consolation, gradually quietens down, and falls silent. Eyes fixed on the now-empty horizon, his mind conjures up the city, country, his previous life.

The pregnant silence returns, given voice by the rhythm of creaking lifeboats and the sound of the waves. The still, small voice of the impetuous Jew is heard, as if talking to himself:

“Nevertheless—nevertheless—should I discount my promissory notes?—But where should I go? Where should I go? Who is waiting for me there?—One can’t even pray there in peace anymore; you stand and pray—and meanwhile the church bells toll the passing time away into your head—Bim, Bam!”

He finishes by saying to himself:

“One hour in our Tel Aviv is better than an entire lifetime in Warsaw.”

The voice of the skinny-faced youth is heard in the land:

“‘They looked toward the desert, and there was the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud.’”¹⁵

He says this seriously, with a straight face.

The skinny-faced man has the kind of face that makes one laugh even when he himself weeps: everyone is amused, despite the seriousness of the situation.

After a few minutes, the impetuous Jew hands out cigarettes to the passengers: there are plenty to go round, and he is very generous. He goes from man to man, offering:

“Please take some! Made in Israel! Help yourself!”

A sceptic mocks him:

“In any case it is forbidden to bring them into Europe, so it’s better to hand them out here, and smoke them on board. Not so?”

The Jew—hand outstretched in the act of giving the man a cigarette—suddenly withdraws his hand disgustedly.—He looks at the young man with angry, slit eyes, raises his hand and angrily throws the box into the sea. One word is hurled from his mouth:

“Pig!”

The man apologizes—the Jew takes a new box out of his pocket and offers them again generously.

He looks for new guests to distribute his cigarettes.

He suddenly sees that the man now accepting his cigarette is the same with whom he had tactlessly interfered while embracing his young wife before the ship sailed. The man takes the proffered cigarette, The Jew lights it up for him, bends over and whispers warningly in his ear:

“Europe is calling.”

They both smile.

The devil knows how he managed in so short a time to understand what the pair were talking about before they parted.