Shabos Nahamu

A Story by ISAAC BABEL

The morning goes by, the evening comes — and it’s the fifth day of the week. Another morning goes by, the evening comes — and it’s the sixth day. On the sixth day, on Friday, you have to pray. When you’ve prayed, you take a stroll through the shtetl in your best hat and then come back home for supper. When he gets home, a good Jew has a glass of vodka — neither God nor the Talmud says he can’t have two — and eats his gefilte fish and his kugel with currants. After supper he feels good. He tells stories to his wife; then he goes to sleep with one eye closed and his mouth open. He sleeps, but his wife in the kitchen hears music, as though the blind fiddler had come from the shtetl and was standing under the window playing.

That’s how it is with every Jew. But Hershele was different from other Jews. No wonder he was famous in all of Ostropole, in all of Berdichev, and in all of Vilyuisk. Hershele celebrated only one Friday in six. On the others he sat with his family in the darkness and cold. His children cried, and his wife gave him hell. Each reproach was as heavy as a cobblestone. Hershele used to answer back in verse.

Once, so the story goes, Hershele thought he would look ahead a little. He went off to the fair on Wednesday to earn some money for Friday. Where there’s a fair you’ll find a pan, and where there’s a pan you’ll find ten Jews. But you’d be lucky to earn three pennies from ten Jews. They all listened to Hershcle’s funny stories, but when it was time to pay, they weren’t around anymore. Hershele went back home with a belly as empty as a wind instrument.

“What did you earn?” his wife asked.

“I earned life everlasting,” he said. “Both the rich and the poor promised it to me.”

Hershcle’s wife had only ten fingers. She bent them back one by one. Her voice was like thunder in the mountains. “Every other wife has a husband like everybody else’s. But I have a husband who feeds his wife on funny stories. May God take away the use of his tongue, and his hands, and his feet in the New Year.”

“Amen,” Hershele said.

“In everybody else’s windows the candles burn like they’d set fire to oak trees in the house, but I have candles as thin as matches, and there’s so much smoke from them it shoots up to heaven. Everybody else has white bread, but all my husband brings me is firewood as wet as newly washed hair —”

Hershele said not a single word in reply. Why add fuel to the flames when they’re burning so brightly as it is? That’s point number one. And then, point number two, what can you say to a cantankerous wife when she’s right? When she got tired of shouting, Hershele went and lay down on his bed and thought, “Maybe I should go and see Rabbi Boruhl?” (Everybody knew that Rabbi Boruhl suffered from black melancholia and that only Hershele with his talk could make him feel better.) “Maybe I should go to Rabbi Boruhl? It’s true the tsadik’s servants give me only bones and keep the meat for themselves. Meat is better than bones, but bones are better than air. I’ll go to Rabbi Boruhl.”

Hershele got up and went out to harness his mare. She gave him a stern and sad look.

“It’s all very well, Hershele,” her eyes said, “you didn’t give me any oats yesterday, you didn’t give me any oats the day before yesterday, and I didn’t get anything today either. If you don’t give me any oats tomorrow, I’ll have to start thinking about whether I’m going to live.”

Hershele flinched before her searching look, lowered his eyes, and stroked her soft lips. Then he sighed so loud that the mare understood everything, and he said: “I’ll go to Rabbi Boruhl on foot.”

When Hershele set off, the sun was high in the sky. The sweltering road ran on ahead. Carts drawn by white oxen and piled with sweet-smelling hay lumbered slowly along. Peasants sat on these high carts, dangling their legs and swishing their long whips. The sky was dark blue, and the whips were black. When he’d gone about five miles, Hershele reached a forest. The sun was already leaving its place in the sky, which was ablaze with gentle fires. Barefoot girls were bringing the cows in from the fields. The cows’ pink udders, heavy with milk, swayed to and fro.

The forest met Hershele with cool shade and soft twilight. Green leaves bent over and stroked each other with their flat hands, whispered together faintly up there in the treetops, and then fell back, rustling and quivering, into their places. Hershele did not hear their whispering. The orchestra playing in his belly was as big as anything hired by Count Potocki for a gala evening. He still had a long way to go. Dusk was hurrying in from the edges of the earth, closing in over Hershele’s head, and spreading out across the world. Unblinking lamps lit in the sky, and the earth fell silent.

It was night when Hershele arrived at an inn. A light was burning in a small window. Zelda, the landlady, was sitting in her warm room by this window, sewing baby clothes. Her belly was so big it looked as if she were going to have triplets. Hershele looked at her small red face with its lightblue eyes and wished her good evening. “Can I stop here and rest for a while, ma’am?”

“Sure you can.”

Hershele sat down. His nostrils heaved like a pair of blacksmith’s bellows. There was a red-hot fire blazing in the stove. Water was boiling in a large caldron and frothing over snow-white dumplings. A fat chicken was bobbing up and down in a golden broth. There was a smell of kugel from the oven. Hershele sat on a bench writhing like a woman in labor. More plans were hatching in his head at that moment than King Solomon ever had wives. It was quiet in the room, the water was boiling, and the chicken tossed and pitched on its golden waves.

“Where is your husband, ma’am?” Hershele asked.

“My husband has gone to the pan to pay his rent,” she said, and paused. Her childlike eyes grew round and large. Suddenly she went on: “And I am sitting here at the window thinking. I would like to ask you a question. I suppose you travel up and down the world, and you’ve been to the Heder, and you know about our Jewish ways. But nobody ever taught me anything. Tell me: will shabos nahamu be coming soon?”

“Oho,” thought Hershele, “a very good question indeed. All kinds of potatoes grow in God’s garden.”

“I’m asking because my husband promised me that when shabos nahamu comes, we’ll go and visit my mother. And I’ll buy you a dress, he says, and a new wig, and we’ll go to Rabbi Motalemi to ask him for a son to be born to us instead of a daughter. But that will only be when shabos nahamu comes. I suppose he’s a man from the other world, this shabos nahamu?”

“You are quite right, ma’am,” Hershele replied. “God himself put those words into your mouth. You will have both a son and a daughter. I am shabos nahamu, ma’am.”

The baby clothes slipped from Zelda’s knees. She got up and bumped her head on a rafter, because she was tall, Zelda was, and plump and red and young. Her high breasts looked like two bags tightly packed with grain. Her light-blue eyes opened wide like a child’s.

“I am shabos nahamu,” Hershele repeated. “For two months now I’ve been doing my rounds, helping people. It’s a long journey from heaven down to earth. My shoes are all worn out. I bring you greetings from all your people up there.”

“From Aunt Pesya?” Zelda shouted, “and from Father, and from Aunt Golda? You know them?”

“Who doesn’t know them?” Hershele said. “I often talk with them just like I’m talking with you now.”

“How are they getting on up there?” Zelda asked, clasping her trembling hands on her belly.

“Not too well,” Hershele replied sadly. “What sort of life do you think it is for a dead person? There isn’t much fun up there.”

Zelda’s eyes filled with tears.

“They’re cold,” Hershele went on, “and hungry. They eat the same as angels, you see. They’re not supposed to eat more than the angels. And how much do angels eat? They’re quite happy with a drink of water. You wouldn’t get a glass of vodka up there once in a hundred years.”

“Poor Father,” Zelda whispered, quite shaken.

“At Passover you get a latke, and one blintze has to last you twenty-four hours.”

“Poor Aunt Pesya,” Zelda shuddered.

“I have to go hungry myself,” Hershele continued, and turned his face away as a tear rolled down his nose and fell into his beard. “There’s nothing I can do about it, you see: up there I’m treated like everybody else —”

Hershele didn’t manage to get any further. With a patter of her large feet she bore down on him with plates, bowls, glasses, and bottles. When Hershele began to eat, she saw that he really was a man from the other world.

To start off with, Hershele had chicken liver garnished with fat and chopped onion. He drank it down with a glass of high-class vodka flavored with orange peel. Then he had fish, mashing soft boiled potatoes into the savory sauce that went with it and putting half a jarful of red horseradish on the side of his plate, a horseradish at the mere sight of which five pans in all their finery would have wept tears of envy.

After the fish Hershele did his duty by the chicken and the broth with blobs of fat swimming in it. The dumplings, bathed in molten butter, jumped into Hershele’s mouth like hares fleeing from a hunter. We don’t have to say anything about what happened to the kugel. What do you think happened to it, if you consider that Hershele sometimes never saw a kugel from one end of the year to the other?

When he had finished, Zelda got together all the things that she had decided to ask Hershele to take to the other world for Father, Aunt Pesya, and Aunt Golda. For her father she put out a new talas, a bottle of cherry brandy, a jar of raspberry jam, and a pouch full of tobacco. For Aunt Pesya she got out some warm gray socks, and for Aunt Golda an old wig, a large comb, and a prayer book. Lastly, she gave Hershele a pair of boots, some grebenes, and a silver coin.

“Give them our regards, Mister Shabos Nahamu, give them all our kind regards” were her parting words to Hershele as he set off with the heavy bundle. “Or would you like to wait a little until my husband comes back?”

“No,” said Hershele. “I must be on my way. You don’t think you’re the only one I have to look after, do you?”

When he had gone about a mile, Hershele stopped to draw breath, threw the bundle down, sat on it, and took stock of the situation. “As you well know, Hershele,” he said to himself, “the world is full of fools. The landlady in that inn was a fool. But perhaps her husband is not a fool, perhaps he has large fists, fat cheeks, and a long whip. If he comes home and chases after you in the forest, what then?”

Hershele wasted no time seeking an answer to this question. He immediately buried the bundle in the ground and marked the spot so that he would be able to find it again.

Then he ran back the way he had come, stripped naked, put his arms around a tree, and began to wait. He did not have to wait long. At dawn Hershele heard the crack of a whip, the smacking lips, and the thud of a horse’s hooves. This was the innkeeper in hot pursuit of Mister Shabos Nahamu.

When he reached the naked Hershele with his arms around a tree, the innkeeper stopped his horse and looked as silly as a monk on meeting the devil.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I am a man from the other world,” Hershele replied gloomily. “I have been robbed of important papers which I was taking to Rabbi Boruhl.”

“I know who robbed you,” shouted the innkeeper. “I have a bone to pick with him too. Which way did he go?”

“I cannot tell you which way he went,” Hershele whispered bitterly. “If you will lend me your horse I will soon catch up with him, while you wait for me here. Undress and stand by this tree. Hold it up and do not leave it until I return. It is a holy tree, and many things in our world depend on it.”

Hershele only had to take one look at a man to see what he was made of. He had seen right away that the innkeeper was not much brighter than his wife. And sure enough, the innkeeper got undressed and stood by the tree. Hershele climbed onto the cart and drove back to where he had left the bundle. He dug it up and went on to the edge of the forest.

Here Hershele put the bundle back on his shoulder, left the horse, and took the road which led to the house of the holy Rabbi Boruhl. It was morning already. The roosters were crowing with their eyes shut. The innkeeper’s horse wearily plodded back with the empty cart to the place where she had left her master.

He was waiting for her, huddled against the tree, naked under the rays of the rising sun. He was cold, and he kept shifting from foot to foot.