London
Megged, Aharon
LONDON AHARON MEGGED Aharon Megged, eminent Israeli novelist, is visiting writer at the Oxford Center for postgraduate Hebrew studies. "London" is part of his novel The Richter File (Mahbarot...
...I looked for one justification after another, but not one was enough to excuse him...
...I discovered that a complete manuscript of G.P...
...Sheldon took him by the arm and brought him toward the serving table, the whole crowd trailing along...
...The entire way home, more than two miles, it rained...
...It was as if every pent-up ounce of humiliation and resentment suddenly sprang forth and overwhelmed me...
...The drawing room was not large, and only eight or ten rows of chairs separated us...
...As soon as I arrived, I turned to Abraham Sheldon, a member of the World Association for Hebrew Language and Culture, whom I had met in Israel some years before...
...I therefore packed up my books and my few belongings and came here to Mrs...
...I didn't want to disturb him so soon,after his arrival, since he was surely tired and in need of rest...
...it turned out to be The Tent of Isaac by my own grandfather, may he rest in peace, Rabbi Isaac Leib Levitin...
...I lived in the midst of it...
...Reimbursement for the labor I've invested in proofing his stories...
...That evening I called Mr...
...All day Saturday, and every day after that, I did nothing but roam the streets and parks, occasionally stepping into a museum and hurrying out, spending lots of time in the underground absentmindedly reading the newspapers...
...Sheldon at his shop...
...It seems he's gone out...
...Although I arrived early, it took me a long time to find Goldsmith's College...
...I couldn't find the strength to get up...
...I still find this hard to explain...
...May, who had treated me so warmly, the gracious Professor Remington, the moss-covered stones, the green meadows, the castles and turrets—in order to come to London...
...When someone like me enters the Bodleian Library, he feels as if he were Ali Baba in the treasure cave, not knowing what to take first...
...We began meeting almost every week...
...I heard his phone ringing...
...Who am I, what am I, that he would pay any attention to me...
...His hair had faded somewhat, but not grayed...
...Robert Whitehill is an American poet and translator...
...I waited...
...Reading two exegetical works on The Garden of the Palace, by Rabbi Isaac beri Todros of Barcelona and Rabbi Shem Tov ibn Gaon, aroused my suspicions that G.P...
...Third, G.P., an apocalyptic book, fixes the year of the final revelation of the Messiah at 1598, but it could not possibly have been recorded before 1600, the year, according to all textual evidence, in which Hayat wrote his work...
...I asked him if he had heard about the impending arrival of Joseph Richter...
...But— And perhaps, I suppose, perhaps all this is simply his revenge for my having left him without his permission, for having left him alone with his manuscripts, with his tales...
...they also invited me to their homes and to future meetings of the Association...
...Enchantment hovered over the auditorium, captivating the listeners completely...
...Hilman's house, located in a Jewish neighborhood...
...When I finally found Goldsmith's College, it was twenty minutes past five...
...I returned at eleven o'clock, like a beaten dog slipping back into its kennel...
...London" is part of his novel The Richter File (Mahbarot Evyatar, published by Kibbutz Hameuchad, 1974...
...I submitted an article for inclusion in the collection, an analysis of one of Richter's stories—an article which the editor praised...
...My blood was seething...
...Stopping at various shops along the way—at Rosenthal's bookstore on Broad Street, with its large collection of rare Hebrew books, or at the Ash-molean Museum, where I found a number of Jewish marriage contracts, or at the magnificent Sheldo-nian Theatre...
...The hotel information clerk said that Mr...
...Why am I writing...
...Then I walked downstairs to the foyer and telephoned Mr...
...This conversation left me even more upset...
...Every day I'd go to the library, and in the evening I'd examine the books at home and write articles...
...I reached into my pocket, took out my pen, and tried to write...
...Richter is in the bath right now...
...Oxford itself was so quiet, so serious, with its ancient stone buildings, its pathways upon which scholars walked about like priests at divine service, its wide, grassy meadows, its awe-inspiring mansions and churches with their dimly lit, vaulted corridors...
...Was my interpretation of the story "The Watchman" unacceptable to him because it exposed various secrets behind his literary personality...
...Perhaps things will be easier for me afterward...
...When I told her who was calling, she asked me to wait a moment...
...I soon learned that Richter himself was responsible for the rejection...
...Meanwhile I immersed myself in what I had been doing those many years—exploring the books of the Kabbalah...
...May, the librarian of the Hebrew collection...
...I said to myself: "It is quite possible that he didn't see me...
...There Richter would deliver a lecture on "Ancient and Modern Legends in Hebrew Literature...
...For a moment it seemed that he had seen me, but then he turned away, looking toward the lecturer and down toward his hands...
...Sheldon opened the meeting by apologizing for the delay: so many admirers had come to Richter's hotel room that it was hard for him to get away...
...He might not have noticed me during that reception business, with all the confusion a person goes through when he gets off a plane in a strange city...
...He was reading his lecture, but I didn't listen...
...Unlike the pointless banter and drivel at the writers' cafes in Israel, our conversations were always directed to the depths of the issue and were characterized by attentiveness, broad-mindedness, good manners and mutual respect...
...Since Berlin...
...and The Two Extremes...
...As he always called me when he was drunk and his true self showed through...
...I plunged into the books and forgot all else...
...The lecturer was the same Professor Uhr-bach I had met at the airport...
...At Oxford I had no Jews, but I did have Judaism...
...I fled the place...
...It was obvious that he had read only one or two of Richter's stories...
...London, March 23,1963...
...I'm not lighting the gas stove, since it costs me a shilling every time I turn it on...
...I shall speak, that I may find relief...
...The long, high rows of bookshelves contained bundle after bundle of parchment scrolls and manuscripts, hundreds of the rarest books in the world, collections of old periodicals no longer found anywhere else...
...Reading the work gave me grave doubts about its origin and its author's identity...
...I couldn't forgive myself for this self-inflicted humiliation...
...Sheldon at home...
...I stopped meeting with him...
...nor could I work there in peace and quiet...
...Hilman, who came out of her room to talk to people inquiring about lodgings...
...I would have been pleased to accompany him, to escort him through the city, its colleges and its libraries...
...If I were to go, I would be able to see him...
...I've brought it for you to read...
...And even the city streets and alleyways were full of quaint taverns, coats of arms, clock towers, and so many stately, historical houses...
...1,577), and an incomplete one in London at the British Museum (Gaster MS...
...He is the author of Orvim Chumim, a book of Hebrew poems, published by Eked Press last year...
...At first his phone was busy, and the hotel receptionist asked me to wait...
...He called out my name...
...The welcoming party swooped down upon him, each of them hurrying to shake his hand and greet him, one man taking one suitcase, another man taking another...
...Hilman's boarding-house in West Hampstead, near the Jewish neighborhood on Finchley Road...
...Or The Four Rows by Jacob ben Asher, published in Constantinople in 1494...
...The room is filled with a kind of cold emptiness...
...he said...
...I arrived in the middle of the lecture...
...The receptionist, familiar with my voice, said: "Yes, Mr...
...But as I waited, he and his entourage passed me by, moving through the exit...
...I organized the planning committee and conceived the idea of Golden Sheaves, the literary collection published in his honor...
...Then, as now, he spoke only five sentences—five sentences spoken in fulfillment of an obligation, five sentences devoid of content or grace...
...I waited until the next morning...
...Surely he had my telephone number...
...It didn't kindle any new lights for me...
...One thing led to another, and when I completed my study of G.P., I began examining various old manuscripts, some from the Cairo Genizah and others written at later dates: The Book of Magical Secrets, The Book of Raziel, The Book of the Raiment (which lay in disarray with The Book of Righteousness), and many more...
...So you're alive...
...Two Israelis were also present, one an emigrant who taught Hebrew and Bible at a Jewish high school and the other a student at the University of London...
...No, his lecture did not show any special depth of thought or erudition...
...That sum would allow me to travel and pay my living expenses for a year...
...I had no choice but to accept my fate...
...Sheldon...
...then I slept like a rock for two or three hours...
...As I toddled behind trying to catch up, they all climbed into three cars waiting for them along the curb, closed the doors and drove off...
...There were also many volumes printed by the Bomberg press in Venice and by houses in Frankfort, Wilhelmsdorf, and Amsterdam in the seventeenth century...
...I spent four months at Oxford, and those were the happiest months of my life...
...For the first time in years, I could join in and contribute to a discussion without the constant interruptions that had taken place back in Israel—interruptions which either tied my tongue completely or made it say things I didn't intend it to...
...He assured me of the existence of the manuscript and promised not only to assist me in my work but also to help me find a place to stay...
...People thronged around him and held him under siege...
...A few seconds later she came back and said: "Perhaps you could call back in a quarter hour...
...Just as in the old days: I would read, make my annotations, and recommend his work to the publishing house staff...
...Nonetheless, I was content here as well, content with my work and with London itself...
...Seven months ago, in September, I landed in England...
...nothing I do can restore me...
...Now that I have calmed down a bit, I can write...
...It became a compulsion...
...But Ethel never mentioned Richter in her letters...
...When I got home in the evening, I was exhausted...
...I wrote the Bodleian librarian...
...Manzer, a Talmudist and great scholar of kabbalistic literature...
...How base, how contemptible are all my insubordinate musings as opposed to his greatness...
...I fell asleep only with the approaching dawn...
...There was not a single ray of originality to freshen up all those tired cliches...
...Levitin, I gave him the message, and now it seems that you are in luck, because the line is free...
...London had many Jews—but they knew nothing of Judaism...
...Would my name, unimportant as it was, discredit him should it be included among the names of the major figures in the collection...
...As a matter of fact, all the things he said about other people he really meant about himself...
...I could bear my yoke if I knew his reasons, if I could find some justification for his reasons...
...Or was he being held captive by his hosts...
...There was just one way to escape him: to go to a far-off place where I'd not have to see him again...
...I tiptoed down toward my seat...
...Perhaps he's paying me back for my one and only sin against him...
...When he rose to address his admirers, it was as though he had returned to the Ohel Shem Auditorium and his birthday celebration ten years before...
...he said joyfully, of course he knew...
...We were surprised to see you disappeared...
...1,398-1,701...
...When I asked Mr...
...The final impetus to leave came after my break with Richter...
...I was hoping that when he and his escorts passed my way, I would have a moment to congratulate him...
...Had he seen me and purposely pretended not to...
...But I had to complete my research on The Garden of the Palace...
...On Monday afternoon I went to the University of London...
...I fell into my chair, still in my wet overcoat, feeling venomous...
...existed at the Bodleian Library (Oxford MS...
...And you know how indebted I am to you," he would say...
...Did he hold a grudge against me for some cause unknown to me, and use the opportunity to get even...
...There is no deliverance from this humiliation, neither in deed nor in word...
...I read the item and reread it...
...Then he got up, the audience applauded, and he approached the podium...
...And I was the one who was rejected, most humiliatingly, from participation in the festivity...
...Finally, when the lecture was over and the readings finished, it was time for tea at the other end of the drawing room...
...Except that our relationship had cooled...
...a time, date and place had already been set, and I was invited to come, naturally...
...Amazing how many people were either calling him or being called by him...
...I left my place by the wall and approached him...
...When he began reading, a chill went through me...
...I couldn't write a word...
...We stood and waited a long time and talked about one thing and another...
...I asked him where Richter was staying, and he gave me the name of the hotel and the room and the phone number...
...The party was supposed to start at eight-thirty, but the guests waited and waited, and at nine-thirty he finally arrived, escorted by Mr...
...I was sorry to leave Oxford and the Bodleian Library which had almost become home for me—Dr...
...Glorious days...
...I was especially surprised that Ethel had not written me about his coming...
...Couldn't he have informed me of his trip...
...The smell of the pages, the Hebrew letters, the flavor of antiquity, even the touch of the old leather covers were enough to make my head spin...
...inside, each building has long, labyrinthine corridors and numberless rooms and halls...
...Evyosor...
...I cannot describe the feelings that came over me during those moments...
...Perhaps...
...Since another boarder and Mrs...
...Could he not have seen me...
...Evyosor...
...Two years before my retirement date, I resigned my position at the publisher's, in order to add some of my early retirement funds to my savings...
...In the library here, you take the book you want and sit down at a table under a deathly gray light between people you don't know...
...I hadn't left Israel since my arrival in 1921, and the thought of leaving—even for a year—was dreadful...
...On the other, why was he pursuing me to the ends of the earth...
...realm of my obligations...
...I was drawn to old volumes from the nineteenth-century Hebrew Enlightenment and to some sacred texts from earlier periods...
...I couldn't go to the library, I couldn't read, I couldn't write...
...What a feeling of elation for a man like me to turn, with his own hand, the parchment pages of the divan of Isaac ibn Khalfun, the earliest example of a Hebrew divan, transcribed in the eleventh century...
...I had various feelings, but all were gloomy and bitter...
...It was the same change—I don't know whether it's praiseworthy or reproachable—that had always occurred when I went over his stories...
...Copyright © Aharon Megged, 1978...
...I stood by the wall and waited...
...I asked him if he could help me find an inexpensive place to live...
...His eyes—the color of the sea—still contained a haughty indifference...
...On September 13,1962,1 landed in England and went to Oxford to be close to the Bodleian Library...
...were copied from The Order of God and from the commentary by Rabbi Judah Hayat...
...To relieve some of my loneliness, I attended two more such dreary meetings...
...Two and a half weeks ago, on a Friday morning, when I opened the pages of the Jewish Chronicle, as I did every week, I was startled to read that Joseph Richter was about to arrive in London...
...But I was paralyzed...
...But the lecture—someone spoke on "Saul Tchernichov-sky and His Works"—was full of worn-out, hackneyed phrases about "Judaism and Hellenism," about "singing the praises of nature against a background of exilic suffering," and other similar expressions lifted out of Klausner and Lachower...
...That was how I became acquainted with a few of them...
...So you're in London...
...The university is spread out over a good number of city blocks...
...It was a temptation I could not resist...
...Then, all of a sudden, Richter's wrath caught up with me...
...After a few minutes the receptionist told me: "Sorry Mr...
...But at that moment an elegantly preened lady brought him a cup of tea...
...It's springtime—at least on the calendar—but outside it's raining, and inside it's cold...
...No one will see these lines anyway...
...I picked up the paper and put it down, picked it up again and pushed it aside...
...The foundations of my universe are not crumbling...
...It's evening, and I'm sitting in my room in Mrs...
...I waited with the receiver at my ear, and in a few minutes I heard her voice again: "It's still busy...
...Richter had gone out...
...I read the novel faithfully and made my annotations, corrections and suggestions...
...I got back wet from head to toe...
...I slipped in and, for a few very bewildering moments, I remained standing—standing alone at the back of the hall, which was built like a theater with the floor slanting toward the stage...
...Second, I found that many chapters in G.P...
...I felt a little better knowing that he had asked about me...
...Hilman's boardinghouse in West Hampstead...
...He then invited me to a meeting of the Hebraists scheduled to be held a fortnight later, an evening dedicated to the poet Saul Tchernichov-sky on the anniversary of his death...
...When I went outside, I saw the party walking across the wide, grassy square across the street...
...Upon my arrival I walked over to the customs hall exit...
...That was my name, Evyatar, in the Ashkenazic pronunciation of the ghetto...
...My eyes did not deceive me: Joseph Richter, "one of the most eminent Israeli writers," etc., etc., author of this book and that, was about to arrive in London on such-and-such a date to receive an honorary doctorate from the School of Jewish Studies at the University of London...
...I saw him throw his arms around one of them, give him a hug and a kiss, and exclaim: "Ornstein...
...Yet could there possibly be a reunion between us, a new start...
...As a matter of fact, they told me that you had called...
...For long moments they stood together exchanging pleasantries...
...Yes...
...I was exalted the whole day long...
...For three hours, from ten until one, I sat by the telephone in the foyer of my boardinghouse...
...And why was he to receive an honorary doctorate...
...I had been corresponding with Dr...
...It would seem that since my suffering is unadulterated, the words might be pure, redeeming...
...The feelings that came over me so often in Israel, that brought me to the edge of destruction, that were the cause, to tell the whole truth, of my fleeing here, to England—never in my worst dreams did I imagine that these feelings would follow me here...
...This is no Oxford...
...From that moment on, I got nothing done...
...At the end of the meeting, as the audience was leaving the hall, I waited beside the door...
...I met about twenty or thirty men and women, most of whom were also observant Jews, whose knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature came partly from childhood education a generation before and partly from what they read in the handful of outdated newspapers, journals and books that trickled out of Israel...
...I said to myself that he must have waited fifteen minutes, and when my call didn't come, he left...
...Anyway, I waited twenty minutes and called again...
...I sat at this desk for almost an hour, incensed, enraged...
...The peace of mind that I had known for more than half a year had suddenly been lost...
...he exclaimed when he heard my voice...
...I was no longer interested in anything but his work, and I didn't engage in much conversation then, or later on, when he brought me a new collection of stories and another novel...
...He has acquired it through his productivity and talent...
...The voice of a mature woman answered in Hebrew...
...Only I, among all the congregants, knew that he was doing this not out of humility but out of contempt...
...The hall was filled with three or four hundred people, most of them wearing skullcaps...
...And this insult, tossed right into my face: "Evyosor...
...I'm a solitary man with few needs, and during the years I had accumulated some savings...
...I was left alone...
...Several times I was misled and ended up at the wrong building...
...This wasn't easy for me, after twenty years of friendship and collaboration...
...I rang the hotel again...
...This novel was awarded the 1975 Bialik Prize...
...Ten days ago, on March 13, Richter arrived in London...
...Why couldn't he leave me alone...
...A night and a day have passed...
...Sheldon, chairman of the meeting, solemnly welcomed "our distinguished guest from Israel...
...Tears came to my eyes as I reverently turned page after page of the earliest editions of nineteenth-century Hebrew journals such as First Fruits of the Times, Daybreak, The Declarer, Dawn, or as my fingers ran over the brittle pages of R. A. Braudes's Whence and Whither...
...Or to read the lines "Thus were the chiefs of Edom dismayed," written in the original hand of the poet Joseph ibn Arbithur...
...I hoped that putting things in writing might drain the venom from my body...
...The same man who had lectured on "The Works of Saul Tchernichovsky" delivered another insipid talk, this time on "The Works of Joseph Richter...
...But the need to leave, to free myself from this stranglehold, kept pressing upon me...
...surely he knew that I had been in Oxford several months...
...Rows of chairs were arranged in the drawing room, and I sat in the last row...
...Most of my mornings were spent in the library of the British Museum, and most of my evenings were spent in my room, as I completed my research...
...He drew his hand away from mine, took the cup, and immediately turned to her...
...and Rabbi Meir ben Eliezer's The Tradition of the Covenant and the Epistle on God's Unity...
...It seemed that all the Hebrew-speaking students from the various colleges had gathered...
...There I came upon a dozen or so people, including someone from the Israel Embassy, two or three men from the Department of Education and Culture of the Jewish Agency, Mr...
...When the guests got up and moved to the other side of the drawing room for tea, I said to myself, "The time for our meeting has come...
...Hidden treasures...
...As a matter of fact, Mr...
...I, who didn't consider myself a part of the official entourage, stood over to the side, trying to catch his eye, waiting my turn as last in line to greet him...
...The one who rejected me was the honoree himself...
...it was a commentary on the writings of Rabbi Shneur Zal-man of Lyady, published in Lvov...
...I went to this meeting, held at the home of Mordecai Engel, a well-to-do, observant Jew who spoke Hebrew with an Ashkenazic accent—not the Sephardic accent used in Israel...
...The distance between buildings is great...
...I had been preparing for this trip for several years...
...But no...
...Hilman both needed to use the phone, I had to put down the receiver and call again later...
...They had even written him from Israel...
...books printed in Vienna, Lvov and Krakow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries...
...I fell into my chair...
...Once, while browsing in the Chassidic collection, I chanced upon a certain tractate that at first glance I could not recognize because of its worn cover...
...If she had told him who was speaking, couldn't he have asked her to say hello for him...
...I came back with a feeling of permanent humiliation...
...It's a narrow room, with a bed and a worn-out bedspread, a chest of drawers and a mirror, a table at which I'm writing, and a chair in which I'm sitting...
...Going to the airport, chasing after him, pitiably waiting for him to leave the university auditorium, sitting by the telephone hour after hour, waiting for any crumb of kindness that he might throw to me...
...Even his clothes were slovenly...
...Why in London, of all places...
...It is no wonder that when he had finished his speech, the whole audience rose and gave him a tumultuous standing ovation...
...But when he spoke of the legend of the River Sambatyon, of the ninth century traveler Eldad the Danite, of the sixteenth century Italian kab-balist Hayyim Vital, of the enchained Messiah, of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbatai Zvi, and of the tales of the great Chassidic sage Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, and on to the modern writers Frishman and Berdichevsky and Bialik and Jacob Steinberg (the only post-Bia-lik writer mentioned in his lecture)—he expressed his ideas with such inspiration, with such lucidity and depth, with such dignity and aggadic melodiousness, that their essence was not in their content but in their melody...
...Permanent, for no act of revenge can ever help me recover from this insult...
...Richter said that he knows you...
...I indulged myself in this paradise of letters and verse, sacred lore and poetry...
...These doubts encouraged me to continue working until I would be able to discover the true identity of the author of G.P...
...The next morning at ten (I was afraid to call earlier, lest I waken him), there was still no answer...
...I was even content with my solitude...
...The next morning I rang the hotel...
...Each day I would spend hours in the library, and except for the librarian and Professor Remington, an authority on Semitic languages and Midrashic literature, I hardly saw a soul...
...Thus evolved my decision to travel...
...was a forgery, a pseudoepigraphi-cal work...
...Or the Talmudic tractate Interweavings published in Wad-al-Hajara—Guadalajara...
...What a thrill it was to hold a first edition copy of Isaac ibn Sahula's long poem, The Ancient Proverb, printed at the Soncino press in the fifteenth century...
...Yes, it was free...
...I stood there, off to the side, among other people waiting for other passengers...
...Then my flesh tingled...
...The commonly held opinion was that it had been written by Rabbi Meir ben Todros Abulafia, but the only evidence I found for this was in the book The Lips of Sleepers...
...The phone in the boardinghouse rang two or three times, but each call was for Mrs...
...I went to the airport to meet him— But I must start at the beginning...
...I did my work as I had always done it...
...I told him that I knew Joseph Richter personally...
...Levitin, but there's no answer...
...I don't know how it happened...
...Did he have that many acquaintances in London...
...He seemed extremely tired...
...He gave me the time, date, and flight number...
...He referred me to Mrs...
...Last night I returned to Mor-decai Engel's house for a party given by the Association in Richter's honor...
...He greeted me warmly, sat down, and acted as if—as if nothing had come between us...
...Despite the fact that he was over sixty, he had not turned gray...
...There is no redemption in them...
...there was so much to see and so much to learn...
...Finally, Mr...
...You have no contact with the librarian or with the other readers or with books other than the one you're reading...
...Although he had always been pale, he seemed younger now than the last time I had seen him, more than seven months ago...
...He had a sheaf of papers in his hand...
...Did he fear the wrath of the critic Ernst Landauer, with whom I had dared to engage in controversy...
...In the evenings, I'd read English books on philosophy and Judaica, borrowed from Jewish lecturers with whom I had become acquainted...
...But despite the editor's promises to include it, this article did not appear...
...If only I could find some justification for him, I would be left in peace...
...He himself was going to ride out to the airport and would be happy if I could be there too...
...Once again, I was flooded with waves of resentment and humiliation...
...The writer was going to appear at a meeting of the Association...
...He attached every sort of embarrassingly flattering adjective to my name: "a superb scholar," "a student of Kabbalah and Jewish philosophy," "a loyal friend of the Hebrew book," and, last but not least—"a man who has written a number of important essays in the field of Jewish studies...
...Twenty years could not be blotted out as if they had never existed...
...I was exalted the whole day long...
...First of* all, I found a similarity between G.P...
...It was strange to see him in tuxedo and black bow tie...
...I returned to the city by bus...
...What right have I to demand this from him...
...I was obliged to rise and take a bow before the applauding audience...
...The cold wind, the budding gardens, the walk up and down the many streets, the old houses, the inns and the churches have helped me forget...
...There was no sense in chasing after them...
...All my thoughts were of Joseph Richter, who was sitting on the stage with four others, two on his left and two on his right...
...Since a considerable distance separated my seat in the audience from his on the stage, I could look at him without flinching...
...Did he find it unpleasant...
...Sheldon, a man whom he introduced as Professor Uhr-bach from the University of London, and various bigwigs I had met at the Association...
...Of course...
...From time to time, I thought that he saw me and that we were looking at each other...
...I tried to catch his eye over the heads of the people sitting in front of me...
...All my resentment, all my bitterness for his humiliating behavior toward me gradually melted away, dissolving through the power of his words, then disappearing entirely...
...To tell the truth, there were many days when I neglected my work and did not engage in research per se...
...Some of the guests politely gathered around me, inquired about my work and asked my opinion on such-and-such book by Agnon, on Shamir's King of Flesh and Blood, on Yizhar's The Captive...
...they themselves are pitiable...
...Of course...
...But they left the stage through another door...
...After all, it was within the...
...He reached into an envelope, took out a large bundle of manuscript pages, handed them to me, and said: "I've finished a novel...
...It was already evening, and I turned toward home...
...That day I walked mile after mile, from the boardinghouse to Regent's Park, from Regent's Park across the entire length of Hampstead to Hampstead Heath and from Hampstead Heath to Highgate, around and around until finally returning to my room...
...As if we had seen each other just the day before...
...It all seemed very strange to me...
...He smiled as he held out his hand...
...On Thursday afternoon I went out to Heathrow...
...A second textual version lay in the British Museum, and I needed to go over it...
...The receptionist by now had taken pity on me and suggested that I leave her my name and number, so that she could have him call me...
...I did as she suggested and waited by the phone for more than half an hour...
...They both went directly to the lecture table...
...Richter came through the gate— neatly dressed in a new gray overcoat, all pale and confused...
...As I walked, I thought to myself, "I have no sense of humility...
...And to those around him he said: "I've not seen him for over thirty years...
...He thanked her, asked where she was from, where she had learned her Hebrew, as if I didn't exist...
...I write, and the words seem repulsive...
...I was the one responsible for this...
...I couldn't take my eyes off him...
...Sheldon where Richter was, I was told that he had taken an escorted trip to Oxford and Cambridge and wouldn't be back till Sunday...
...He too asked where you were...
...In the afternoons, when the weather was not too cold, I'd stroll through the gardens alongside the river and walk among the ancient college buildings...
...I listened to what he had to say, and as I listened, a change began to take place inside me...
...I didn't see him for months...
...Then one of the people in the audience touched me and pointed out a free seat in one of the front rows...
...The doctoral presentation would take place on Monday afternoon at five in Goldsmith's College at the University of London...
...He surely knew that I was in London...
...I was the initiating force behind this celebration...
...I couldn't bear it any longer...
...I felt compelled to leave, both by my research and by the increasingly burdensome weight of my relationship with Richter...
...I tried to sleep but I couldn't...
...I called him five times, and each time the phone in his room was busy...
...or learn that it was only a compilation of passages from other works...
...So you're here...
...Last night at eleven o'clock, I returned from a meeting of the World Association for Hebrew Language and Culture, held at the house of Mordecai Engel in honor of Joseph Richter, visiting writer from Israel...
...Where were you...
...I also visited a few times with Dr...
...There was no answer...
...In the evening I called him again...
...What does he owe me...
...I've already received my reward...
...On the one hand, why hadn't he notified me of his coming...
...The London hotel at which I first stayed was beyond my means...
...I asked him if he knew the exact time of Richter's arrival, since I wanted to meet him...
...But one day in December, 1954, Richter appeared in my office at the publishing house...
...And although I spent very little time with the two or three Hebrew scholars I met, I loved their company and their conversation, in the college restaurant at lunchtime or in their homes in the evenings...
...When my call didn't come, I thought that the receptionist might have forgotten to give Richter the message, or that he might have called and got a busy signal...
...I gave him the benefit of the doubt...
...It was a break that occurred not all at once, but in stages, the first of which had been his fiftieth birthday celebration ten years before...
...He is a great man, deserving of all the praise and honor they have bestowed upon him...
...What took me to Oxford was this: During the course of my study of kabbalistic literature, I had come across a volume entitled The Garden of the Palace...
...it was as if I were seeing him for the first time...
...I was astonished at what a handsome and tall figure he cut...
Vol. 3 • April 1978 • No. 5
