Читать книгу Joseph in Egypt (Vol. 1) - Thomas Mann - Страница 6

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“Where are you taking me?” Joseph asked Kedema, one of the old man’s sons, as they were setting up the sleeping-huts, in the rolling, moonlit lowland at the foot of the mountains called Fruitlands.

Kedema looked him up and down.

“Thou’rt a good one!” said he, and shook his head in token that he did not mean good at all but various other things such as pert or queer or simple. “Where are we taking thee? But are we taking thee anywhither? No, not at all. Thou art by chance with us, because our father hath purchased thee from harsh masters, and thou goest with us whither-ever we go. But taking thee that cannot be called.”

“No? Then not,” responded Joseph. “I only meant: whither doth God lead me, in that I go with you?”

“Thou art and remainest a funny fellow,” countered the Ma’onite, “and thou hast a way of putting thyself in the centre of things till one knoweth not whether to wonder or be put out. Thinkest thou, thou ‘Come-hither,’ that we are a-journeying in order that thou mayest arrive somewhither where thy God will have thee to come?”

“Not that do I think,” Joseph replied. “For I know that you, my masters, journey whither you will and on your own affairs and of a certainty no question of mine meaneth any wrong to your dignity or power. But lo, the world hath many centres, one for each created being, and about each one it lieth in its own circle. Thou standest but half an ell from me, yet about thee lieth a universe whose centre I am not but thou art. Therefore both are true, according as one speaketh from thy centre or from mine. And I, on the other hand, stand in the centre of mine. For our universes are not far from each other so that they do not touch; rather hath God pushed them and interwoven them deep into each other, so that you Ishmaelites do indeed journey quite independently and according to your own ends, whither you will, but besides that you are the means and tool, in our interwovenness, that I arrive at my goal. Therefore I ask whither you are leading me.”

“Well, well!” said Kedema, and kept looking him up and down, his face turned away from the peg he was driving. “All that thou thinkest out and thy tongue runs on like a lizard’s tongue. I will tell the old man my father how thou—son of a dog as thou art—takest leave to riddle and stick thy nose into such high wisdom as that thou hast a universe to thyself and we are destined for thy guardians. Take care, I’ll tell him!”

“Do so,” responded Joseph, “it will do no harm. It will make thy father careful not to sell me too cheap to the first comer, if he thinketh of making trade with me.”

“Are we chattering here,” asked Kedema, “or are we setting up a hut?” And he motioned him to lend a hand. But as they worked he said:

“Thou askest too much, when thou wilt know from me whither we journey. I would have naught against telling thee, if I knew. But it is the old man my father’s business, he keepeth all in his own head how it will go and afterwards we see how it cometh to pass. So much is clear, that we keep on, as the shepherds thy harsh masters counselled us, and go not into the interior but are bound toward the level shore; there shall we travel day by day and come into the land of the Philistines, the cities of the seafaring traders and the pirate strongholds. Perhaps thou wilt be sold there somewhere to the galleys.”

“That would I not have,” said Joseph.

“No use to wish. All will be as the old man hath thought, and whither we journey at the end, that he himself perhaps knoweth not. But he would like us to think that he knoweth all quite precisely, beforehand, and so we all act as though we thought so—Epher, Mibsam, Kedar, and I.... I tell thee this because we happen to be setting up the huts here together; otherwise I have no reason to say it to thee. I could wish the old man would not exchange thee too soon for purple and cedar oil but that thou wouldst remain here with us for a spell that one might hear more from thee about the universes of men and their interwovenness.”

“As thou wilt,” answered Joseph. “You are my masters and have bought me for twenty silver pieces, including my tongue and my wits. They are at your service; and to that about the universe of the individual I can add something about God’s not quite flawless wonder-working with numbers, so that man must improve His calculations; and further about the pendulum, the year of the dog star, and the renewal of life—”

“But not now,” Kedema said. “The huts must absolutely be set up now for the old man my father is tired, and so am I. I fear that I could not follow thy tongue any more for today. Art thou still ailing from thy fast and are thy limbs still sore where thou wast bound with cords?”

“Scarcely at all,” responded Joseph. “After all it was only three days that I spent in the pit, and your oil with which I might anoint myself has done my limbs great good. I am now whole, and nothing detracteth from the value and usefulness of thy slave.”

He had, in fact, had opportunity to cleanse and anoint himself, had received from his masters a loincloth and for cooler hours a rumpled white hooded cape such as the thick-lipped camel-boy wore. Probably the expression “to feel as one new-born” may have fitted him more precisely than it has any human being since the creation of the world—for had he not actually been born again? It was a deep cleavage and abyss that divided his present from his past, it was the grave. Since he had died young his vital forces reassembled themselves quickly and easily beyond it; but that did not prevent him from distinguishing sharply between his present existence and that earlier one which had ended in the grave, nor from considering himself not the old Joseph but a new one. If to be dead and perished means to be quite inseparably bound to a state which permits no looking back, no gesture, no smallest resumption of relations with his previous life; if it means to be vanished speechless from that former life without leave or thinkable possibility of breaking the silence with any whatsoever sign—then Joseph was dead; and the oil with which he might anoint himself after cleansing from the dust of the grave had been no other than that which one gives the dead into the grave for his anointing in another life.

I stress this point, for it seems to me urgent to defend Joseph, now and later, from a reproach which has often historically been levelled against him. For certainly a reproach lies in the query: why, after escaping from the pit, had he not bent all his strength to get in touch with Jacob in his pitiable state, to let him know that he still lived? The opportunity must early have presented itself; yes, as time passed it would surely have been more and more possible for the son to send to that father in his error some word of the truth. Proportionally strange, even offensive must it seem that he did nothing of the kind.

But the reproach confuses the outwardly with the inwardly possible, and leaves out of consideration the three black days which preceded the rising of Joseph. They had driven him, amid severest anguish, to an insight into the deadly error of his former life and to a renunciation of it; they had taught him to accept his brothers’ conviction of his death. His resolve and purpose not to betray their belief was the firmer because it was not voluntary but as involuntary and logically necessary as the silence of the dead. A dead man is silent about his love, not out of lovelessness but necessity; and not in cruel wise was Joseph silent to his father. Indeed it became very hard to him, and the longer it lasted the harder it grew, that we may believe; not easier than on the dead lies the earth which covers him. Pity for the old man who he well knew had loved him more than himself, whom he too loved with grateful, natural love, and together with whom he had brought himself down to the grave tempted him sore and would have made him glad to act contrary to his better sense. But there is something strange about a pain felt by others for our own fate. Our sympathy with it is of a peculiar kind, distinctly harder and colder than that we feel with a stranger sorrow. Joseph had passed through frightfulness, he had received cruel instruction; and it eased for him his compassion for Jacob, yes, the consciousness of their common burden made his father’s woe seem somehow in the nature of things. His bond to death prevented him from cancelling the bloody sign which the other must have received. Jacob, he knew, could not fail to take the blood of the kid for his son’s blood; and that this must be so worked upon Joseph until it practically obliterated the distinction between “This is my blood” and “This represents my blood.” Jacob held him for dead; and since he did so irrevocably, unalterably—then was Joseph dead or was he not?

He was. The proof lay in the compulsion to keep silence to the father. The kingdom of the dead received him—or rather would receive him; for he soon learned that he was still on the way thither, being led in that direction by the Midianites who had bought him.