If I could achieve only that …

8

I hadn’t seen Abraham Sulitzer, my old Ahasverus, since that meeting on the train in the Christmas holidays. And now, our paths cross. It’s extraordinary how opportunely people enter and leave my circle, as if directed by an argument that calls them closer or pushes them away, depending on whether they are required or not. Life has this kind of aptness, which is not allowed in literature. Were I a man of letters, I think the hardest thing would be to mask the unbelievable twists of reality, which show such daring and initiative … (But what is this thought doing here? I’ll tell it to Walter. He, as a critic and newspaperman, could at least put it in an article.)

It turns out that Abraham Sulitzer is my neighbour. He lives a hundred metres away, to the left, in an alley that opens on to my street. But because he heads out for work at seven in the morning and I closer to nine, an age has passed without us intersecting. Yesterday, though, I had to get to the train station at dawn (a package sent home through Lulu) and on the way back I turned a corner and bumped into my friend Abraham.

‘I saw you last week at Jabotinski’s conference and wanted to call out to you, but thought better of it. Who knows? I thought, maybe he’s forgotten me. A bookseller he met once on a train … But I wanted to ask if you’d read Şapsă Zwi’s history. It’s a book I was fond of.’

I reassured him somewhat, telling him that it had interested me greatly. But I’m sure my reply did not please him. (What was ‘It interested me’ supposed to mean? A book either knocks you down or raises you up. Otherwise, why pay money for it?) Abraham Sulitzer certainly thinks this way, but doesn’t say it out loud. He just smiles, full of reticence and eager amiability. (Well? Didn’t you like it? Let’s say, as you do, that you found it interesting. Well? Aren’t you entitled to? Perhaps I can do something for you …)

We separated quickly – we were both in a hurry – but he invited me to visit him some evening – an invitation I accepted with pleasure.

*

Books, books, everywhere books. I’ve seen people talking to their cats, their dogs … Abraham Sulitzer talks to his books.

‘Come down here to Papa, third in line. Easy, now, don’t wreck the whole row. Who’ll put you back in place if you do? You? The hell you will. It’s always me. And who does Roza shout at? Also at poor me!’

Mr Sulitzer exaggerates. Roza, his wife, doesn’t shout: at most she grumbles.

‘Lord,’ she complains to me, in that same lilting Jewish-Moldovan as his, ‘I have brothers too, and brothers-in-law, who are salesmen. One sells bobbins, another sells boots. And? They spend the day at the shop, and shut up shop in the evening – and that’s the end of it. Does anybody take their bobbins home to sit and talk to them?

‘It’s a curse, life with this husband of mine. I’m so embarrassed when neighbours call by to borrow a little tea or salt when they run out, and come across a fully grown man, talking to himself, to the walls, to the books. Now, tell me if you think that isn’t pure madness.’

I avoid a straight reply, so as not to add to conflict in the Sulitzer household, but my friend Abraham, at his table, besieged by books, shy and wise, smiles at me from behind his glasses, from behind the covers of a book opened wide – a smile of complicity (‘Let her talk, that’s how she is; women are like that; she’ll get over it’), the smile of a child who has upset a jam-jar and awaits his punishment.

I look at this kindly old man, who loves books with a passion, like an addiction. I look at this patient philosopher, terrorized by the nagging of a terrible wife, against whom he has no defence but a hidden smile, and I suddenly remember Monsieur Bergeret.

How well Abraham Sulitzer resembles him in this moment, surrounded by books. Abraham Sulitzer and Anatole France. A Yiddish-speaking Anatole France. What a blasphemer I am!

He shows me an entire library, full of surprises. A Yiddish translation of Cervantes. Molière, Shakespeare.