The Spinoza of Market Street (9 page)

In ten minutes the widow and Helena had left the ball. Her mother held her train in one hand and pulled Helena along with the other. Helena did not walk but shuffled slightly. The coachmen snickered, pointed, whispered a muffled innuendo. The widow's coachman quickly came up to help the ladies into their carriage. The widow could not raise her feet and the coachman had to lift her up by her hips. Helena collapsed into the carriage. The driver mounted, cracked his whip and a great cry came up from everyone--catcalls, hooting. Children who should have been asleep mingled with the adults, running behind the carriage, screaming frenziedly, flinging stones and horse dung. Someone at the ball had overheard the widow admonish Helena: "Wretched girl, what can you do now but dig a grave and lie down in it?"

After the widow and Helena had left, the ladies flocked around Dr. Yaretzky with increased enthusiasm. They chattered, smiled, lured him with their eyes, as if each were Helena's mortal enemy, and savored her disgrace. They tried to extract from Dr. Yaretzky a word, an explanation, a passing remark, even a jest--anything that could be repeated later. Dr. Yaretzky seemed perturbed, his face pallid. Without either answering or apologizing, he forced his way past those who surrounded him. He left the ballroom, not through the main entrance, but through a side door. Since he lived near the club, he'd come on foot, and now he headed home. Someone against whom he happened to stumble maintained that the Doctor had not been walking, but running.

Alone at last in his office, Dr. Yaretzky asked aloud: "Now, what sort of nonsense was that?"

He did not light his kerosene lamp, but sat on the couch in the dark. Since his arrival in town he'd enjoyed many triumphs, but today's conquest was not to his taste. Obviously, Helena was madly in love with him, but to what end? She was no eager matron, simply an old maid. He had no desire to saddle himself with a wife, to become a father and to raise sons and daughters--to perpetrate all that absurdity. He had his share of money and affairs. On this same couch he'd experienced adventures which would have been branded pathological lies by him, had they been claimed by someone else. Long ago he had concluded that family life was a fraud, a swamp to mire fools--since deceit is as essential to women as violence to men. It was not too likely that Helena would deceive him, but what use was she to him? He appealed to women because he was single. As soon as a man marries, other women treat him like a leper. "I'll ignore the incident," Dr. Yaretzky decided. "They'll gossip about it until they forget it. Every scandal grows stale eventually."

He went into the bedroom and lay down--but sleep would not come. He could still hear the music from the ball--polkas, mazurkas, military marches. Distant laughter and sounds of violence drifted towards him. A warm breeze bore the scents of grass, leaves, flowers from beneath his window. Crickets chirped, frogs croaked. The night swarmed with myriads of creatures, each of them calling. Dogs bayed, cats caterwauled. A neighbor's child awoke in its crib. The moon, obscured earlier, now appeared, suspended miraculously in the sky. Stars of many colors sparkled around it. "What is it she sees in me? Why is her love so strong?" mused Dr. Yaretzky. "It's only that old urge to reproduce." The Doctor considered himself a follower of Schopenhauer. No one understood the truth as well as that pessimistic philosopher. His collected works, bound in leather, tooled in gold, stood in Dr. Yaretzky's bookcase. Yes, it was only the blind will to propagate, to perpetuate suffering, the eternal human tragedy. But for what purpose? Why give in to the will if one were aware of its blindness? Man was given his drop of intellect so that he might expose the instincts and their devices.

The Doctor realized that it was useless to try to sleep. He was even out of the sleeping pills he had taken on similar nights. He put on his clothes. He suddenly felt like walking. It might help him sleep later.

V

A WINDOW IN THE RABBI'S STUDY

Dr. Yaretzky walked without knowing where. Did it matter? He felt unusually alert and agile. His feet hadn't seemed this light in years. He observed that although this day's triumph had only embarrassed him, his nervous system reacted as it had to previous triumphs. His body felt buoyant as if Helena's kiss on his hand had diminished the effect of gravity. He breathed more deeply. His senses grew keener. "If I were to go hunting right now," he thought, "I could trap a stag with my bare hands. I'd grab him by his antlers and snap his spine." He felt an urge to fire a gun but had left his revolver at home. He wanted to rap on a shutter and frighten a Jew--but controlled himself. After all, a doctor couldn't behave like a wanton boy.

Yaretzky grew more serious. He recalled that afternoon, years ago, when, having divided a sheet of paper into many slips, each bearing the name of a county seat, he had picked from a hat the name of this town. What if he had picked another town? Would his life have been different? Consequently, everything that had happened to him had been pure chance. But what, actually, was chance? If everything was predetermined, no such thing as chance existed. And then again, if causality was nothing but a category of reason, then there certainly was no such thing as chance. The thought swiftly went further. Conceding that Schopenhauer was right, then that which Kant called "The thing in itself" was will. But how did it follow that the will was blind? If the world-will could bring out Schopenhauer's intellect, why couldn't the world-will itself be endowed with intelligence? "I'll have to consult 'The World as Will and Idea'," Dr. Yaretzky decided. "There's bound to be some sort of an answer in there. I've neglected my reading shamelessly."

He realized that he was in the street, near the rabbi's house. A shutter in the rabbi's study was open. On a table near the stove, a candle flickered in a brass candleholder. Books and manuscripts were heaped on the table. The venerable rabbi, his white beard distended, a skull cap above his high forehead, an unbuttoned gabardine over a yellow-gray fringed garment, sat engrossed in a book, glass of tea in hand. On one side of him was a samovar, on the other, a fan of chicken feathers, used no doubt to fan the coals. Everything, it seemed, was precisely where it should be. The old rabbi was pouring over one of his theological volumes, but Dr. Yaretzky watched, amazed. Did the rabbi keep such late hours, or had he already risen for the day? And what in that book engrossed him so much? The rabbi seemed withdrawn from the world. The Doctor knew the old man. He had treated him for catarrh and hemorrhoids. He, Yaretzky, had handled the rabbi with more respect than the other patients, had not said: "Say aah--," had not asked: "Head hurt, eh? . . ." The Jews of the town deified their rabbi, spoke of his erudition. His large gray eyes, his high forehead, his entire appearance suggested knowledge, understanding, character--and yet something else, reminiscent of an alien, impenetrable culture. It was too bad that the rabbi knew neither Polish nor Russian, for Yaretzky, while he had learned a little Yiddish in his youth, did not understand it sufficiently to converse with the rabbi. The old man seemed more spiritual than ever now. Blending with the night, he resembled an ancient sage, both saint and philosopher--a Hebrew Socrates or Diogenes. His shadow extended to the ceiling. "Where do they get such huge foreheads?" Yaretzky wondered. He remembered what the other Jews had told him--that the rabbi was a
gaon
, a genius. But what kind of a genius? Only in line with prescribed dogma? And how could he have made peace with a world full of sorrow? "I'd give one hundred rubles to know what the old man is reading!" Yaretzky said to himself. "One thing is certain--he doesn't even know there's a ball tonight. Physically they dwell side by side with us, but spiritually they are somewhere in Palestine, on Mount Sinai or God knows where. He may not even be aware that this is the Nineteenth Century. Surely he doesn't know that he is in Europe. He exists beyond time and space. . . ."

Yaretzky recalled something he'd read in a periodical: The Jews do not record their history, they have no sense of chronology. It would seem that instinctively they know that time and space are mere illusion. If that were so, perhaps they could break through the categories of pure reason and conceive the thing-in-itself, that which is behind phenomena?

Yaretzky's urge to communicate with the rabbi increased. He stopped himself just as he was about to tap on the window. He knew beforehand that he would be unable to speak with the old man.--Who knows? Perhaps it was their desire to remain apart that kept them from learning other languages. Judaism could be summed up in one word:--isolation. If not driven into a ghetto, Jews formed a ghetto voluntarily; if not compelled to display a yellow patch, they wore the kind of clothes that their neighbors found odd.

On the other hand, the Jews who did learn other languages and mingled with the Christians were bores.

VI

A SCENE OF LOVE

Just as he was about to walk on, something else caught his eye. The door opened from a back room and an old woman, entered, tiny, with bent shoulders, dressed in a wide housecoat and battered slippers. Rather than walk, she scraped along--the bent head bound in a kerchief, the face puckered as a cabbage leaf, the ancient eyes hung with pouches. She crept towards the table, silently picked up the chicken feather fan and fanned the coals under the samovar. Dr. Yaretzky knew her well. It was the rabbi's wife. Strange, that the rabbi did not address her and kept his eyes on the book. But his face grew gentler as he half-concentrated on his reading, half-listened to his wife's movements. He raised his eyebrows and on the ceiling the shadow trembled. Dr. Yaretzky stood there, unable to move. He was convinced that he witnessed a love-scene, an old, pious, love ritual between husband and wife. She'd roused herself in the middle of the night to tend the coals of the rabbi's samovar. He, the rabbi, did not dare interrupt his holy studies but, aware of her nearness, he offered silent gratitude. How different all this was! How oriental--"They've lived for no one knows how many years in Europe. Their great-great-great-grandfathers were born here, but they conduct themselves as if only yesterday they'd been exiled from Jerusalem. How is this possible? Is such behavior hereditary? Or is this an expression of deep faith? How can they be so certain that everything inscribed in several ancient volumes is absolutely true?

"Well, and what of me? How can I guarantee that the world is blind will? Let us say, for the sake of argument that 'The thing in itself is not blind will, but a seeing will. Then the whole concept of the cosmos changes. Because, if the universal powers are capable of seeing, then they see all--every person, every worm, every atom, every thought. Then the slip of paper that I ostensibly chose by pure chance was not chosen by chance at all but was simply part of a plan, a decree that I experience everything that I've experienced here. If this is so, everything has a purpose: every insect, every blade of grass, every embryo in every mother's womb. It would then follow that that which Helena did tonight was no idle caprice, but part of a scheme of the all-seeing will. But just what is this scheme? Was I destined to become a father?"

It suddenly struck Dr. Yaretzky that while he'd been philosophizing, someone had lowered the curtain--he'd undoubtedly been observed. He felt ashamed. It would be gossiped about among the Jews that he loitered at windows.

He began to stride away hastily, almost running. His thoughts ran with him. He remembered that when he'd first come to town, the rabbi's beard had been blond, not white, and the rabbi's wife?--she'd still had a houseful of youngsters to raise. Had so many years passed? Does one change this quickly from youth to old age? And how old was he, Yaretzky? Would he too soon grow gray? And how long does life last? If it were true what he'd recently read in a medical magazine, he had fourteen years of life left. But how long is fourteen years? The past fourteen years had flown by like a dream. He couldn't exactly say where.

Something within Dr. Yaretzky began to rebel. "Is this my fate? Is this my purpose? Fourteen more years to creep to patients, then fall dead like a dray horse? How can I resign myself to this? No, better a bullet in the temple! But, conceding that the world-will is not blind--this opens innumerable possibilities. An all-seeing Will--is God. The rabbi, this would mean, is no fanatic at all. He has his philosophy. he believes in a seeing universe, rather than a blind one. All the rest is tradition, folklore. Apparently the powers of creation try to achieve variety in the shapes of their creatures, as well as in their behavior.

"Assuming this to be true, what must I do? Return to the church? Become a Jew? Stop seducing my patients? Because if the cosmos sees all, it can also punish. . . . No, I must put all this nonsense out of my head. From here on, it's but one more step to religious positivism.--But why am I running like this? And where?" All at once Dr. Yaretzky saw that he was at the widow's estate. His feet seemed to have brought him here of their own volition. "What am I doing? What am I looking for? Someone will surely see me! Am I going out of my mind?" But even while cautioning himself, he walked up to the gate leading into the courtyard. There was no watchman about, and the gate was unlocked. Unhesitatingly, he pushed it open and walked inside. "Suppose the dogs attack me? They'll mistake me for a prowler." Incautious, abandoned, he was like a drunk to whom awareness of his condition does not bring sobriety. He walked stealthily, like a boy raiding an orchard. He was searching for something, he did not know what.

Why were the dogs so still? Were they sleeping? Everything had been left unattended . . . The house emerged, its windows black. "She isn't here!" something within him said. He followed the path which led to the back of the house, the garden and the fields. Dr. Yaretzky had once visited the estate to treat an ailing farm hand, a long time ago. Although the moon was still shining, there was a pre-dawn silence in the air. The frogs and crickets grew still. The trees seemed petrified. The world held its breath, awaiting daybreak. Dr. Yaretzky felt as if everything within him had also ceased to function. He moved like a phantom. He was awake, but dreaming. He walked past a barn, sheds, a stack of hay. Suddenly he heard a moan and at that instant a shallow pit materialized. He forgot to be surprised: In the pit lay Helena.