Читать книгу Voyage into Savage Europe - Avigdor Hameiri - Страница 15

Chapter 3

A Telegram on Credit

The name of our ship is Adria. It’s wonderfully clean and organized, off-white in color and not particularly big, with more speed than one might assume from its size.

The crew are polite, well-mannered and very friendly.

A Jewish ship with a polite crew? Is that even possible?

Polite Jewish sailors?! Unheard of!

The ship’s captain is the only Jew in all the shipping companies. His wife is also interesting: she comes from the family of Rachel Morporgo, the gentle Hebrew poetess.¹ She had previously entreated the great, munificent Moses Montefiore to accompany him to the Holy Land as a domestic^..² But Montefiore’s wife refused permission for a poetess of Israel to travel to the Land of Israel—her life’s dream. I suddenly remember—my friend the poetess Rachel (Bluwstein) told me that, a few years ago, her request for support from Zionist charities to travel to Israel, as a tutor for Mrs. Montefiore’s children, had also been rejected.³ (When she told me that, she knew nothing about Rachel Morporgo and the grand Mrs. Montefiore)

Against stupidity, even the gods fight in vain.

The ship has its own Torah scroll and, on Sabbaths and festivals, the captain makes thehip’s reading room available for use as a prayer room.

The captain is well informed about the goings-on in the land of Israel—he is a true Zionist.

We arrive at the Corinth Canal—during the Bronze Age, this city provided copper for building the bronze gate leading to the inner temple.—One of the crew predicts a storm during the next day or two.

His prediction comes true. Although the storm is not very heavy, we are tossed around, fall, and pick ourselves up—attacks of seasickness appear and many sea-green faces can be seen leaning over the rails.

The kevutzah lad can overcome everything except sea-sickness.⁴ While vomiting—he grumbles with eyes full of tears and bitter anger:

“Look how disgusting it is abroad!”

I look at the storm around me and search for the Land of Pamphylia.⁵ This is the location where a storm descended upon Herod the Great on his journey to Rome to enlist his friend Mark Anthony and noble Augustus Caesar in the fight against Antigonus the Hasmonean.⁶

The tossing and turning makes most of us sick.

“Lord of the Universe! What do you want from us?! None of us are going to Rome to strengthen the Roman Empire—Even Jabotinsky doesn’t enlist Mussolini’s help against his brother Chaim Weizmann!”⁷

Brindisi—“Brindusium.” The site where Herod docked with his great trireme, a mighty ship with three tiers of oarsmen, built for him on the island of Rhodes.

The ship is at anchor. The freezing night air nips and stings.

A mother wakes her small child and brings him up onto the deck:

“Do you feel the cold, my sweet child? This is real winter’s cold!”—The child—well wrapped up by the mother so as not to catch cold—exclaims:

“This isn’t cold! It was much colder in Jerusalem!”

His face contorts with the weeping of a small boy whose sleep has been interrupted.

“There’s no snow! You promised me snow! Where’s the snow?”

“Tomorrow, dearest, tomorrow it will snow!”

But the boy doesn’t believe her:

“It isn’t true! There won’t be snow tomorrow either!—Here too, they make snow out of cotton wool: and that ‘snow’ is warm!”

The mother explains: “I showed him a display of ‘snow’ at Christmas in one of the Christian pharmacies in Jerusalem, and now he’s demanding the real thing.”

Groups of Italian frontier policemen and soldiers—part of Mussolini’s gendarmerie –walk around on the seashore. They wear their hats Napoleon-style, as if each was a mini-dictator.

I visited Brindisi several times before the war, but this time something is missing. What could it be? Ah yes, there is no more garbage or mud in the streets. The beaches of Italy were, formerly, world-renowned for their filth. Now, their cleanliness is exemplary.

An Italian who speaks good German explains it to me:

“The Duce has said in one of his speeches: ‘I want to see the sidewalks so clean that food can be eaten from them with appetite, as if on finest china.’ Woe to anyone who tries to throw paper or cigarette butts onto the street!—Trouble awaits!”

I tell him the joke about the young Russian who is walking with his girlfriend in the streets of Moscow on New Year’s Day. He says to her in a benevolent and gentle tone:

“Spit, Marusya! I’ll pay the fine!”

The Italian tries in vain to understand and smile at the joke. What is the meaning of “spit?” Why must she spit?

Apparently there is no hope for reciprocal understanding between Moscow and Rome.

I feel a sudden flash of sympathy for dictatorships. Perhaps it might be worthwhile to attempt a reorientation in Israel from the Moscow to Rome axis, if only to properly clean the streets of our dear Tel Aviv at least once?!

My sympathy is not popular with other passengers, and a violent argument erupts about Fascism, Bolshevism, England, Weizmann, Jabotinsky, the workers, the bourgeoisie, pioneers, Arabs, outside assistance, Petah-Tikvah, Ein Harod, the different newspapers, the country itself, the plague, and God knows what else.⁸ Only heavenly forces on high and in the sea below end the argument without bloodshed. The ship starts to rock and argument gives way to finding a firm footing and ensuring that everyone is not tossed overboard, providing an outlet valve for all the pent-up energy.

Morning dawns.

A tense calm prevails after yesterday’s violent arguments. The God of political parties has erected a partition between the different extremist groups. The singing brothers succeed in driving away political devils, and calm returns to the assembly.

Now, every time someone tries to start an argument, he is attacked from all sides:

“Quiet! Don’t compete with the sea! If you want tashlich (the name given by the skinny-faced man to seasickness), put your finger in your throat!”⁹

The only one who has not gotten seasick so far is the honored lady who keeps strict kashrut.

“You people who eat trefa food are responsible for the ship’s rolling.¹⁰ You must vomit out the forbidden food that is making others suffer. Look at me: I am almost old,” the “almost” naturally sticks in her craw, “and I have never yet become s-e-a s-i-c—”

She has scarcely time to finish, before she too is leaning over the rail, heaving and green-faced.

The broad-shouldered young man comes up to her and says restrainedly:

“Not all nonkosher food that enters the stomach causes sea-sickness—otherwise all the oceans of the world would not be large enough to contain the vomit!”

Trieste!¹¹

Trieste—formerly a symbol for the world’s filthiest coastal cities—is unrecognizable. Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, once said about it:

“It seems that there is not enough water in the Mediterranean to wash its streets clean.”

This, from a royal despot with iron discipline, heir to the throne of one of the greatest dynasties in Europe.

Before the war, it was usually impossible to sit in the open areas of Trieste coffeehouses, summer or winter, because the wind blew in a cloud of papers and miscellaneous filth. Sometimes these even blew into the windows of the fourth-floor dining room.

Now, the sidewalk looks like a polished mirror. How did this come about?

Apparently, there was no need for seawater to clean up this beautiful city naturally, only rivers of blood from the Isonzo Front.¹²

This cleanliness is also felt in the city’s personnel. The police’s courtesy has to be seen to be believed—even the porters are polite and honest!

I have the feeling that something is missing here again. What is it this time? I remember: it’s the hordes of beggar children who used to surround me, wailing: “Soldi (money), signor, soldi!”

There is no memory of the panic, or jingles about “centrism,” so prevalent before the war, although the city remains just as poor as it was then (perhaps even poorer).

If only I could put a little of the policemen’s courtesy into my pocket, and send it to the police in my beloved Land of Israel!

“For a little honesty, I would even be prepared to become a thief!”

More (Austrian) German is spoken here than was the case before the war. Similarly, the people of Israel and their language have been compared to olive trees, both, as if to anger the existing authorities.¹³ This language usage is exemplified by the fact that any nation living under a foreign government addresses its dogs in the language of that government, which now is Italian. Most chauvinistic Magyars still address their dogs in German.

Doves flying around the main street apparently only need German, in order to be understood.

I remember one explanatory example: in Tel Aviv, dogs are spoken to by their owners in English—but our “doves” don’t necessarily require Hebrew.

When I see, after an interval of seventeen years, the Hungarian flag with its crown, and the sign on the door of the consulate, an uncomfortable feeling comes over me, and my heart convulses with the tragedy of poor, mutilated postwar Hungary.¹⁴

Are we Hungarians truly still foreigners and proselytes in our new Hebrew Zionist world? How long will it take before it’s allowed to insult a Hungarian to his face, without worrying about his loyalty to the ancien regime?¹⁵

In the same way as it is still forbidden to make derogatory remarks about the “generous-natured Russian muzhik” in front of a Russian-born Jew.

I’m pleased that my daughter is not Hungarian-born.

The cold reception by the consular staff disturbs my compassionate reveries about poor Hungary.

“Jerusalem?”—the secretary asks. Despite the six languages which gush from her lips like an overflowing stream, she still retains the warm, pretty Turano-Mongolic features of her ancestors.¹⁶

“Yes. Jerusalem.”

“A real Hebrew writer? In the language of the Old Testament?”

“Yes, in the language of the Old Testament.”

“But how is it that you speak such fluent Hungarian?”

“I was born, educated, and grew up in Hungary, and served as a Hungarian officer during the war.”

Apparently she is not pleased to hear this. It isn’t pleasant to be indebted to someone whom one doesn’t much like. During the revolutionary riots in Hungary after the war, the bravest Jewish officers were hated the most.¹⁷

“Why are you travelling to Hungary?”

“I haven’t been there for seventeen years.”

“You’ll be disappointed. Budapest has changed.”

“I’ve heard that it’s even more beautiful than ever.”

She appears confused.

“Yes. It has become more beautiful. But not—not—for—”

“Not for Jews,” I help her.

This clears up her apparent confusion.

“Yes, sir. But—it really isn’t so bad. As usual, people exaggerate. How are things in Palestine?

“In Palestine, we are very fond of Christian Hungarian pioneers: there really are a few, even if you may not think so.”

“Real Magyars?”

“Absolutely—not Jews at all. Two were wounded in a recent Arab attack.”

She looks at me with amazement

“How were they wounded?”

“While protecting us from the Arabs.”

She looks at me with surprise, thinks for a moment, and breathes a sigh of relief.

“Oh, how interesting! That is very good to hear.”

She laughs sweetly and charmingly.

“OK, so very good: that means that we are quits, correct?”

“Certainly, miss, our accounts have been balanced.”

I stand outside, thinking of our recent exchange. Seventeen years ago, I was also in an overseas Hungarian consulate. The conversation went as follows:

“How long abroad?”

“Almost a year.”

“A whole year? Aren’t you ashamed, not to have seen your beloved homeland for a year?” She says this with a kind and friendly reproach.

“I think that the homeland could do without me for a year.”

“That is absolutely untrue, sir. Our homeland needs all its citizens.”

Then—and now.

Then: “the homeland.” Now: a balance sheet of riots, pogroms and bloody settling of accounts.

I go into a post office, to send a telegram.

I write the telegram out and want to pay—but don’t have any small change. I am momentarily confused—the clerk taking the telegram has no change either. I want to leave, but she stops me.

“No problem, sir,” she says, taking the telegram from me—“Go and have lunch: you can get small change there, and pay me then.”

I finally bring the money to her at 3:00 p.m.

“The telegram has surely already been processed”—she says to me.

An hour later, I hear from a female acquaintance travelling with me that she too has sent a telegram here “on credit.”

I find myself making constant subconscious comparisons with our own beloved Tel Aviv. What can we learn from the European system to improve ours at home? Before my post office visit I hadn’t learnt much: at most—clean streets. But now? I’m green with envy: “A telegram on credit?” Good Lord! Will we ever be privileged to see something like this in our own postal system—a community in which an employee has such trust that she sends a telegram off first, and gets paid later?

Mussolini couldn’t achieve this on his own—not even 1,000 Mussolini’s. It has to come directly from the people.

I find out that there are about sixty schools in Trieste. But not one of the hundreds of teachers is interested in politics.—They are high priests of education, and would not even think of moving from their high-educational perch, for any reason at all.

On the other hand, it would demean the noble politicians to get involved with everyday matters such as politeness and trust. That is not their domain.

I think how great an educator our elegant gentleman Dr. Mossensohn could be—were he not a politician!¹⁸