In the Cellar (a story)
Shahar, David
IN THE CELLAR DAVID SHAHAR In the cellar of the house, where the rags of all the years lay piled in rotting heaps and their junk lay rusting, I found new treasures every time I went down with the...
...And maybe it isn't a farthing but a shilling...
...Gentilla Luria...
...Landau again...
...Suddenly he sat down on a carved Damascus stool and placed her on his knees, and with the tickling of his thick moustache as he kissed her a warm jet burst out of his lap and filled her to overflowing...
...Why, there are museums that would be glad to exhibit it...
...Landau's Eye Clinic in order to devote himself to his writing, and Mrs...
...Take those pieces of junk right back to the cellar, and come and have a taste of this soup I made," she said then, and she had not laid eyes on them since...
...The lands of two entire villages were his to do what he liked with, but he bequeathed them to his Jaffa wife while to her he left only this house, although he had always preferred her to the Jaffa woman...
...A curse from a beggar...
...I promise you that Boulos effendi will jump on them, and be prepared to pay you a lot of money for them...
...This ancient dagger was all that survived of the different kinds of weapons, decorated saddles, bracelets, earrings, and other trinkets and ornaments which the Arabs left in pawn with the master of the house when they came to borrow money from him in the days when the Turks ruled the land, and the late Yehuda Prosper Bey was at the height of his power and greatness...
...Translated by Dalya Bilu...
...How good it was to be alive then, and sweet and warm in this cellar...
...And when he was done he would rummage in the drawers of the chest, bring up fistfuls of jewels, and scatter them over her nakedness—for he had plenty of Oriental fantasies, the old lecher, in addition to his two villages south of Jaffa...
...Yes, yes, Gentilla, I can promise you that an English Lord will decorate his drawing room with the things that are lying around in your cellar...
...Not any more," said Yehuda Prosper and in a low and slightly shaking voice he began explaining to her that from his first meeting with the borrower he could already sense whether the latter would come back to redeem his pledge or not...
...Go and ask him...
...But there was something which intrigued me even more than the music box and the dagger and the rest of my finds, and this was a piece of paper pinned to the cellar door with the words "Please do not disturb" written on it in capital letters...
...Luria...
...She was sure that Berl, who had rushed to pin up the notice "Please do not disturb" before the ink was dry on the contract, would lose no time in smuggling the shoub'ria, the coffee grinder, and the mortar and pestle out of the cellar in the dead of night and selling them to Boulos effendi at the first opportunity...
...Why, a person who had not grown up in Turkish times did not know how sweet life could be...
...Not the riches of the late Yehuda Prosper Bey, may he rest in peace, and not the honors of the Supreme Court Judge, the Officer of the British Empire, Dan Gutkin, may he be granted long life—all Berl asked for was a quiet corner in an out of the way cellar where he could sit and weave his dreams and put them down on paper...
...And what, after all, did this poor wretch ask of life...
...As she walked slowly down the room delicately stroking whatever she came across with a trembling hand and a pounding heart—the silk and the wood and the copper and the leather and the silver and the gold—she felt as if she was walking in a world which had been revealed to her once before, a long time ago, in a dream she had seen in her sleep, or in another reality where she had once lived...
...For two days she swept and mopped and scrubbed and pulled down cobwebs...
...In the middle, on chests and chairs and stools and armchairs, were piles of embroidery and rolls of silk...
...Yes, yes—in this cellar she had known how good and sweet and warm it was to be alive...
...Luria sat up straight, frowned, and said to me: "I think those things are likely to bother him after all...
...Please go and bring me the shoub'ria, the mortar and pestle, and the coffee grinder...
...For him there was no greater insult than the Sultan Abdul Hamid and Turkish times...
...He's an expert on antiques and artistic articles...
...The cellar was spotlessly clean and tidy, the shoub'ria was hanging on the wall, underneath the window, and the coffee grinder and mortar and pestle were standing ornamentally on top of the chest of drawers...
...Once I found a music box which, despite its hoary antiquity, played the Marseillaise, to the accompaniment of groaning and creaking from its rusted metal and frozen cogs, when I turned its twisted handle, and another time I discovered a Turkish shoub'ria in its sheath underneath a pile of sacks...
...alluding here to an incident which had taken place a week before...
...Gentilla Luria doesn't give a damn for all the shnorrers in Jerusalem and what they might think to see her stooping in the middle of the street in the middle of the day to pick up a farthing...
...A fool of yourself in front of all the rabble and scum of Jerusalem...
...Mold, not jewels...
...Why, if anyone had told me that that revolting Berl Raban with his squinting eye, who is no more, after all, than an insignificant little clerk in Dr...
...On the right there were heaps of decorated saddles and harnesses and on the left cupboards'overflowing with jewels...
...When we climbed back onto the veranda and Mrs...
...Even if he had not been floating in the dream world of his inventions he would not have seen that shilling shining in the middle of the street, for the simple reason that he was so short-sighted...
...What kind of valuable things could you possibly find in my cellar now...
...David Shahar, a fifth generation Jerusalemite, is a noted Israeli author...
...Since Berl pinned the notice to the door immediately after the contract was signed, and she saw with her own eyes that he intended taking the cellar over completely and keeping her out, her heart contracted with the suspicion—which turned into a certainty—that all kinds of jewels and precious things had remained hidden under the piles of sacks from the days of the Turks, and that he intended smuggling them out in the middle of the night in order to sell them to Boulos ef-fendi, that "Arab crook who became a millionaire from dealing in stolen jewels and antiquities...
...He hasn't even moved in yet," she said, with pursed lips and an indignant jerk of her head, "and already he slams the door shut in my face and doesn't let me in...
...Not to speak of all kinds of beggars and paupers—a person like Berl Raban didn't even enjoy the dubious pleasure of getting compliments in the mail from the manager of Barclays Bank...
...He invited her to his house to repay her for the flowers and for the grace of her curtsey and the sweetness of her words: and when they had finished drinking the drinks and tasting the delicacies served them by the kawass, Senor Moise, he went down with her to the cellar so that she could choose herself a gift after her heart's desire...
...She was then the wife of Yehuda Prosper Luria, the Consul, the rich Bey, an important, titled dignitary in the hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire...
...He'll sell them again to some English Lord visiting the Holy City...
...Only Lords were capable of appreciating the wonderful inventions of Haim Longlife...
...And then you go try to put salt on his tail and get your things back from him...
...A man who lives in a cellar and hasn't got enough money even for one cigarette, not prepared to stoop to pick up a shilling from the street...
...And only after he had studied the whole book and read it front to back and back to front and inside out and upside down did he lift his eyes and say to her: "You with your Turkish notions from the days of the Sultan Abdul Hamid...
...Luria, the widow of Yehuda Prosper Bey, to stoop down in the middle of the street in Jerusalem in order to pick up a farthing...
...He wanted to insult her, of course...
...They're in fashion today...
...It's a hundred years old at least...
...Luria...
...She breathed the jasmine-scented air in deeply and said to herself, "All this is mine," and to Yehuda Prosper Bey she said, "But all these pawns don't belong to you...
...For thirty-two years he had buried all his dreams deep in his heart, giving them up so as to earn a decent living for his wife and three children, and only after he had seen his daughter married and his two sons were old enough to earn their own living had he freed himself of the burden of the Eye Clinic in order to devote himself, at long last, to the dream in his heart...
...Mrs...
...Let Gabriel realize the kind of person he was dealing with...
...It wasn't a shilling but a farthing, but what goes for a farthing goes for a pound, and the man too proud, to stoop for a farthing would never be a millionaire...
...Look, Haim—money...
...Haim Longlife was right...
...And really, what had he brought up with a flourish from the cellar...
...A little peace and quiet in the corner of the cellar...
...And what did you do in your rashness and eternal contrariness, your perversity and obstinacy...
...With every step her heart thrilled, contracted and expanded, and when he opened the heavy cellar door she caught her breath: the room she entered was not a cellar but a thickly carpeted treasure trove...
...As she was descending the cellar stairs she remembered that she had been overcome by a severe headache during the previous search, a headache which had blurred her vision and forced her to flee from the stench of the rotting sacks before she had time to look and see exactly what was hidden beneath them...
...The brazen crook took the farthing alright, but as soon as he turned to go his face contorted with resentment and he spat out a curse in Yiddish, sure that she couldn't see or hear him anymore...
...Because he was preoccupied with thoughts of the millions lying in wait for him in the lap of his inventions, he did not see the shining shilling lying in front of him in the middle of the road...
...Gentilla Luria, to help her carry the wooden folding bed, which she would bring up and take down at regular intervals for mysterious reasons known only to herself...
...she retorted...
...Not a day of her life passed wituout remorse, not the purchase of a pair of stockings without regret: before she had finished fumbling in her purse for the money to pay for the stockings, she was already flooded with regrets for the folly of her purchase...
...Feelings of regret were nothing new to Mrs...
...He pulled her back by her elbow and said, "It would not become Mrs...
...Luria...
...Bring them one by one...
...All he asked was to be left alone, not to be troubled by petty, insignificant things, not to be bothered by vanities...
...With this coming behold you are wedded to me in sanctity according to the law of Moses and Israel," he whispered hoarsely into her ear and came into her again five more times, and after the wedding they continued to make use of the cellar for their daytime intercourse...
...And in this he resembled his brother, Haim Longlife—both of them were immersed in a dream world, and the only difference between them was the kind of dream they dreamed, one of them dreaming of patented inventions and the other dreaming of Melchizedek king of Salem and Joshua the son of Nun and the prophets of Baal, and trying to make poems out of his dreams...
...Haim Longlife was so absorbed in the world of his patents and inventions, the patents and inventions that were going to make him rich with one blow, that he never even saw what was right under his nose...
...A similar suspicion had taken hold of her once before, when she let the cellar to Berl's brother, Haim Longlife, who lived in it in the days when he was hiding out from his creditors and the messengers of the court and the execution officers, and she had already searched it thoroughly then, but the search of two years before could not allay her fresh suspicions, which were growing stronger every minute...
...And for what...
...But her son Gabriel, her beloved son Gabriel, did not even trouble himself to listen to what she was saying...
...Berl Raban had rented the cellar after he stopped working in Dr...
...And what can you already get in this day and age for a farthing...
...She did not understand exactly what he meant, but the slight tremor cutting into his words filled her with exhiliration...
...In those days everything had a taste and a smell and a color and a substance and fullness which could be felt—for hours at a time in the cellar she would feel it and sense it, the substantiality of the thing, taking her pleasure of it and even licking it with her tongue: the gold and the silver and the copper and the bronze and the wood and the fur and the silk and the marble and the crystal and the parchment—-and then came modern times and turned all this substantiality into numbers on a piece of paper that was sent to your house through the mail from Barclays Bank...
...But all these everyday regrets and self-reproaches were nothing compared to the feeling piercing her heart now: it was a smarting kind of pain burning deep down inside her ever since Berl had hurried to slam the door in her face, announcing in capital letters not only that he did not want her to come in, but that even permission to knock on the door was denied her...
...And she had answered him mockingly, "Haim, Haim Longlife...
...Gentilla Luria," he replied with a smile, smacking his lips as if savoring something delicious which had found its way into his mouth of its own accord, "to step out in the company of a man who would stoop to pick up a coin in the street...
...Landau'sf Eye Clinic, and who wouldn't have got that job either without my late husband's recommendation, and before he rose to the heights of a clerk, when he was still a poor little boy running around barefoot in Jerusalem almshouses, used to mop the floor in this cellar, and the veranda and the stairs, not because he was such a marvelous floor-mopper but because my late husband wanted to give him a chance to earn a couple of pennies—if someone had come to me and told me that this Berele would wind me round his little finger, that it would be enough for him to let out one little peep and I would open my house to him, and only one week after he gave notice to the Eye Clinic—I would have spat in his face, I would have taken him to court, I would have told Dan Gutkin, the Supreme Court Judge, to put him in prison for libel...
...She stood there talking and talking, wearing her soul out with talking, and Gabriel went on sitting in his chair reading Bed's useless poetry...
...Everyone wanted to be intimate with Gabriel—and he had to choose Berl...
...Luria, who pressed on the handle with all her strength until the heavy door opened with a muffled creak...
...An old Turkish shoub'ria from the days of Methusalla, and a pestle and mortar from the days of the Sultan Abdul Hamid, and an old coffee grinder from the days of Haroun el Rashid...
...I've just remembered that I haven't got a single cigarette in my pocket, and with this farthing we can buy one from Hadash Shapiro on the corner...
...But Yehuda Prosper did not wait for the wedding in order to reveal the mysteries of the cellar to her...
...Nor to pick up a shilling either," he replied...
...When she reached the place beneath the window she was flooded with the fragrance of jasmine...
...Please do not disturb...
...For the sake of a farthing...
...Luria was not the woman to be wound around anybody's little finger, not even with the help of all the original inventions of Haim Longlife...
...And after moving into her cellar, hadn't he emerged beaming with happiness and said to her: "Mrs...
...she had called to him—not seeing from the distance what coin it was—and made to bend down and pick it up...
...Mrs...
...He brought her to the cellar right after the ceremonial visit he paid to the graduating class of the Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls...
...On the contrary—Berl was an extremely responsible person...
...As long as Turkish rule lasted, until the outbreak of the war, his lust knew no bounds...
...Mrs...
...he said, all excited and in a state, with his short-sighted eyes blinking behind thick glasses, "This kind of thing is worth a fortune nowadays...
...A Jerusalem pauper floating in a world of millions, flying on his fantasies, and with aristocratic ways into the bargain—what choice has he got but to die of hunger three times a day...
...But what did Gabriel know about Turkish times, and what did his whole generation know about Turkish times...
...And what did Haim Longlife do...
...But Haim Longlife, in his tact-fulness and the delicacy of his feelings—for he was a dear man, an aristocrat of nature, in other words: a man who had come into this vile world with a noble soul—not only did not say "I told you so," but ignored the argument which had preceded her stooping completely, and since she had already done it and there was no use in crying over spilt milk, he tried at least to alleviate her feelings of regret and said: "It's a good thing that you took no notice of me and picked up this farthing...
...And if you imagined that Haim Longlife had indeed rummaged in the hidden recesses of the cellar during the nine months he hid out in it, and had found all its secret treasures and laid his hands on them—you simply did not know him or understand his nature...
...Still, here she had to say, to the credit of that patent-registerer and inventor, that he did not gloat...
...In fact nothing bothered Berl, who hastened to pin the notice to the door with a drawing pin the moment the contract was signed: as far as he was concerned, he was quite prepared to move into the cellar at once and make himself at home in the middle of all the junk—but Mrs...
...You needn't bring them all at once— they might be too heavy for you...
...she said to him, "Mrs...
...And even if a miracle had happened and his eyes had been opened and he had seen the shilling, would he have stooped to pick it up...
...Luria was in a hurry to remove—with my help—"all kinds of things likely to bother him"— as she explained to me...
...Copyright © by David Shahar...
...You made a spectacle of yourself in broad daylight...
...The story of her shock at the scandal of Bed's resignation, at the abandonment by this wild man of his wife and three children to starvation and disgrace, she repeated not only to the Judge and Dr...
...Bed with his squinting eye and his hoarse whispering voice...
...He had debts and not an account in Barclays Bank, senseless fantasies and wild ideas in his feverish brain and not the sweetness of life...
...and she bent down and picked up the coin...
...Landau's Eye Clinic a bright coin had glittered up at them on their way...
...Even in the best of his dreams Berl had never seen a fraction of the joys of life which she had felt in this cellar in the days of the Turks...
...And a thing like this has to happen to me," she muttered to herself and her eyes grew moist with a dry weeping, "and only a week after he gave up his job...
...Landau, and to Pesach the Fat, that gossip who owned the Cancan Cafe, but even to her son Gabriel, although—or maybe because—she knew that Berl was a good friend of Gabriel's...
...After repeating emphatically that her heart had always told her that "Berl Raban was a wild man capable of anything," she concluded that "there was more to it than met the eye," and affirmed that she had always sensed with a sixth sense that there was something peculiar going on behind that squinting eye, behind that smile in the depths of his moustache, deep down in the depths of Bed's brain...
...Don't you believe me...
...But if that same proud pauper thought up till then that he could bend her to his caprices, this was the moment he realized that Mrs...
...He had a precious soul, Berl...
...Then she stood up and began to clean the cellar...
...Once when he was accompanying her to Dr...
...They didn't know how good it was to be alive then, how warm and sweet...
...He'd say he didn't know what you were talking about...
...In his fantasies he had dealings only with Lords...
...Luria would be so overcome by the light of his countenance that she would open her pursestrings and cover him with golden Napoleons...
...The notice did not stop Mrs...
...She regretted the whole business: she should never have rented her cellar to Berl Raban...
...The search, which had preceded the occupation of Haim Longlife, had not been a proper search...
...Nightly intercourse did not satisfy him: in full daylight, and especially in the middle of the most important business deals, he would excuse himself for half an hour and take her down to the cellar to enjoy the conjugal delights of the set table and the upset table, of the armchair and the saddle and the carpet and the rolls of silk...
...Take this shoub'ria for example...
...A stinking beggar had come asking for alms and cursed her for giving him one farthing...
...But the thing that moved me most was the branch of flowering jasmine which had been placed in a glass on the table...
...Gentilla Luria coughed dryly, cleared her throat once or twice, and wiped her nose on the corner of her apron...
...And in so saying he did not know that before they left for the Eye Clinic she had seen him with her own eyes putting two or three cigarettes into his silver case—the solid silver engraved cigarette case which was all that was left of his big deal businesses after he went bankrupt for the second time...
...Bed whose one eye turned to the sun in Gibeon while the other gazed at the moon in the valley of Ajalon...
...It would not become Mrs...
...But Haim was not Berl, and Berl was not Haim...
...He would always smile at the whole world, because he could never identify the people coming towards him, and being a born aristocrat of the spirit he wanted to greet all his friends and acquaintances, and the blurred figure approaching him may well have been a man or a woman he had once known in days gone by...
...And I promise you that he'll sell it again to an -English Lord for ten...
...The kind of person who turned his back on the pleasures of this world and gave up a good job to realize the dream in his heart was a real idealist in this day and age, not like the kind of hooligans who called themselves idealists, reckless characters who could see only themselves and were prepared to bring the whole world back to chaos in order to get their own way, spoilt children who thought they had everything coming to them, who argued that a world which did not offer them everything they wanted on a silver tray deserved to be destroyed...
...A marvelous fellow...
...He could easily have taunted her and said "I told you it wasn't a shilling but a farthing...
...They belong to then-owners...
...There's a proud beggar for you...
...Gabriel could mock the days of the Turks as much as he liked, Gabriel and his friend Berl and Haim Longlife and all the rest of their generation could make fun of the Sultan Abdul Hamid to their heart's content, and turn Turkish ideas into a byword for everything old-fashioned and idle and stupid and wicked and rotten and corrupt...
...For molesting the widow of Yehuda Prosper Bey, for ridiculing a sick old woman, yes, yes: a sick woman...
...There was no street then, and a jasmine bush grew by the wall of the house...
...He asked nothing of this world—neither riches nor honors nor pleasures...
...A kind of enthusiasm took hold of her, a strange, hungry, eagerness...
...A week before this, when she heard the news of Bert's sudden resignation from his job, she had hurried round to Judge Dan Gut-kin in order to inform him of her worries and suspicions with regard to this insane resignation, which was "abandoning Bed's wife and three children to starvation and disgrace...
...Don't laugh, Gentilla...
...There was an oil lamp burning in it, and all the swords and daggers and lances and pistols hanging on the wall underneath the round window glittered in its light...
...Luria sank panting into the red plush armchair, we heard Berl's footsteps approaching...
...A fine friend he found for himself...
...Luria, who became cooler and more reserved the hotter Berl was to move in at once, blinked her eyes suspiciously, thought it over, and notified him that he would only be able to occupy his "study" (that was what they called the cellar in the contract, in the clause "Premises for Rent"—a "study") in two days time, after she had removed all the things "likely to bother him...
...Luria sat down on the wooden folding bed in the cellar with her face to the high round barred window covered with cobwebs in the corner right beneath the ceiling...
...And with the smarting pain, welling and burning inside her, was a gathering cloud of anger at herself for agreeing to rent him the cellar the moment he asked for it: before he had time to move his moustache and say "I want," she had already agreed, and not only agreed but agreed gladly...
...You could even say that she knew them inside out, was familiar with their every nuance...
...Of all the girls she was the one chosen to present the important visitor with a bouquet of flowers, and from the look in the eye of the Consul she knew— though she was only an innocent girl of seventeen and he a man of fifty, with a wife in Jaffa—that something was going to happen...
...That wretch no doubt imagined that as soon as he appeared before her, Mrs...
...And you know what he'll do with them...
...AIL the precious things had remained concealed in their hiding places underneath the sacks, and if he had troubled himself to rummage in the dark corners Haim Long-life would have been able to leave Mrs...
...You could ask Boulos effendi for a pound or even two pounds for it...
...Even the riches of the rich had no substance in our day, no taste or smell or touch of flesh on flesh—numbers printed on a flimsy piece of paper with the compliments of the manager of Barclays Bank in Jerusalem...
...This one cellar was all she had left, but this one cellar from the days of the Turks, this one cellar from the days of the Sultan Abdul Hamid, had kept her and Gabriel alive for years...
...In that case," she said, "please be so kind as to pick up that shilling for Mrs...
...IN THE CELLAR DAVID SHAHAR In the cellar of the house, where the rags of all the years lay piled in rotting heaps and their junk lay rusting, I found new treasures every time I went down with the old landlady, Mrs...
...And what's the wonder that he never had a farthing in his pocket to pay for a cigarette...
...And on the morning of the third day she called me to help her bring up the wooden folding bed...
...You don't know what valuable things I've found in your cellar...
...Luria's cellar in possession of a fortune...
...I can feel my eyes beginning to hurt again, and I'll have to go and see Dr...
...Cobwebs, not pearls...
...I found nothing in your cellar," he'd say...
Vol. 2 • September 1981 • No. 4
