Two Tales: Betrothed & Edo and Enam Read Online Free Page A

improved, and he himself could now earn his keep by tutoring. He no longer needed the Consul’s aid, but his affection for the older man still kept the twice-yearly meeting a fixture. When they parted the Consul would take out his pocket book, note down the next date and time, and remark, ‘So, in another six months! However, you must telephone my office beforehand.” Lest that should sound like a veiled intention to put Jacob off, he would pause, add the months up, and conclude, “Well, in another half-year!”
    Once, when Rechnitz telephoned on the prearranged day, he was told that the Consul was engaged and would not be available. Instead, he was asked to call a day or two later. Next day, when he was teaching one of his pupils, the boy’s father asked Jacob to repeat the name of the consul he had once mentioned in conversation, and then showed Jacob a newspaper, pointing to an obituary notice. “Tomorrow,” he added, “you will be going to the funeral of the Consul’s wife.”
    All that night Jacob Rechnitz lay awake. Days that had gone now stood before him, days in and out of the Consul’s house, when the Consul’s wife had shown him so much kindness, in her ways and in her words. Jacob’s mother, too, had loved him as a mother should love her son, and he had returned her love in a son’s normal way; but his affection for Frau Gertrude Ehrlich was something apart. It was a love that could be accounted for by no natural cause, though there was reason for it, no doubt, as there is reason for all things; yet the reason was forgotten, the cause was lost and only the effect remained. He had known, indeed, that Frau Ehrlich was an invalid, and this had troubled and saddened him; but never had he been so grieved as on that night, in his awareness of her death. Shoshanah was now orphaned of her mother. That Shoshanah’s mother was dead, that she herself was an orphan, did not evoke in him any feeling of pity; it was rather like a new motion of the soul, when the soul attaches itself at once to one who is absent and another who is present, and is taken up into both as one.
    Before daybreak Jacob Rechnitz had risen and made his way to the cemetery. In the press of his nighttime thoughts Jacob was sure that he had missed the funeral, though if he hurried he might yet arrive in time to see the last of the actual burial. The cemetery gates were open and he could hear the sound of digging among the graves. He ran forward between the trees and the tombstones in the direction of the sound. Two men were at work, standing up to their waists in the earth; a third was pacing out the length of the grave. When the diggers noticed Rechnitz, they looked up. “Do you want to see if it fits you?” they asked, indicating with their spades that he was free to step into the grave. Rechnitz did not understand them and did not move. The man pacing out the grave asked him what he had come for. Rechnitz looked at him in amazement: how could he ask such a question! When at last he realized that Frau Ehrlich’s body still lay in the house, it was almost as if he had heard good news. Though she was dead, she was at least above ground.
    Before the entrance to the Ehrlichs’ villa men and women stood in silence. There are times and places when the tongue is tied even in company. Jacob’s mother stroked his cheek and wiped away a tear; his father pressed his foot into the ground as though testing for a foundation. Suddenly the gates opened and men in black mourning clothes brought out the bier, laying it in a black hearse to which four black horses were harnessed. The scent of flowers floated across from the wreaths on and about the bier. The sound of muffled weeping mingled with the scent; an old servant had covered her mouth with a handkerchief so as not to be heard. While the hearse was being made ready for the journey, Shoshanah and her father came out. Shoshanah wore black, with a black veil over her face, her arm in her father’s arm.