DIARY OF A MESHUMAD[1]
Tchemnovosk, Saturday (midnight).—So! The first words have been written. For the first time in my life I have commenced a diary. Will it prove the solace I have heard it is? Shall I find these now cold, blank pages growing more and more familiar, till I shall turn to them as to a sympathetic friend; till this little book shall become that loved and trusted confidant for whom my lonely soul longs? Instead of either Black or White Clergy, this record in black and white shall be my father confessor. Our village pope, to whom I have so often confessed everything but the truth, would be indeed shocked, if he could gossip with this, his new-created brother. What a heap of roubles it would take to tranquillize him! Ah, God! Ach, God of Israel! how is it possible that a man who has known the tenderest human ties should be so friendless, so solitary in his closing years, that not even in memory can he commune with a fellow-soul? Verily, the old curse has wrought itself out, that penalty of apostasy which came to my mind the other day after nearly forty years of forgetfulness, that curse which has filled my spirit with shuddering awe, and driven me to seek daily communion through thee, little book, even with my own self of yesterday—"And that soul shall be cut off from among its people." Yea, and from all others, too! For so many days and years Caterina was my constant companion; I loved her as my own soul. Yet was she but a sun that dazzled my eyes so that I could not gaze upon my own soul; but a veil between me and my dead youth. The sun has sunk forever below the horizon; the veil is rent. No phantom from the other world hovers to remind me of our happiness. Those years, with all their raptures and successes, are a dull blank. It is the years of boyhood and youth which resurge in my consciousness; their tints are vivid, their tones are clear.
Why is this? Is it Caterina's death? Is it old age? Is it returning to these village scenes after half a lifetime spent in towns? Is it the sight of the izbas, and their torpid, tow-haired, sheepskin-clad inhabitants, and the great slushy cabbage gardens, that has rekindled the ashen past into colours of flame? And yet, except our vodka-seller, there isn't a Jew in the place. However it be, Caterina's face is filmy, phantasmal, compared with my mother's. And mother died forty years ago; the grass of two short years grows over my wife's grave. And Paul? He is living—he kissed me but a few moments back. Yet his face is far-away—elusive. The hues of life are on my father's—poor, ignorant, narrow-minded, warm-hearted father, whose heart I broke. Happily I have not to bear the remembrance of his dying look, but can picture him as I saw him in those miserable, happy days. My father's kiss is warm upon the lips which my son's has just left cold. Poor St. Paul, living up there with your ideals and your theories like a dove in a balloon! And yet, golubtchik, how I love you, my handsome, gifted boy, fighting the battle of life so pluckily and well! Ah! it is hard fighting when one is hampered by a conscience. Is it your fault that the cold iron bar of a secret lies between our souls; that a bar my own hands have forged, and which I have not the courage or the strength to break, keeps you from my inmost heart, and makes us strangers? No; you are the best of sons, and love me truly. But if your eyes were purged, and you could see the ugly, hateful thing, and through and beyond it, into my ugly, hateful soul! Ah, no! That must never be. Your affection, your reverential affection, is the only sacred and precious thing yet left to me on earth. If I lost that, if my spirit were cut off even from the semblance of human sympathy, then might the grave close over my body, as it would have already closed over my soul. And yet should I have the courage to die? Yes; for then Paul would know; Paul would obey my wishes and see me buried among my people. Paul would hire mourners (God! hired mourners, when I have a son!) to say the Kaddish. Paul would do his duty, though his heart broke. Terrible, ominous words! Break my son's heart as I did my father's! The saints—voi! I mean God—forfend! And for opposite reasons. Ach, it is a strange world. Is religion, then, a curse, eternally dividing man from man? No, I will not think these blasphemous thoughts. My poor, brave Paul!
To-morrow will be a hard day.
Sunday Night.—I have just read over my last entry. How cold, how tame the words seem, compared with the tempest with which I am shaken. And yet it is a relief to have uttered them; to have given vent to my passion and pain. Already this scrawl of mine has become sacred to me; already this study in which I write has become a sanctuary to which my soul turns with longing. All day long my diary was in my thoughts. All my turbulent emotions were softened by the knowledge that I should come here and survey them with calm; by the hope that the tranquil reflectiveness which writing induces would lead me into some haven of rest. And first let me confess that I am glad Paul goes back to St. Petersburg on Tuesday. It is a comfort to have him here for a few days, and yet, oh, how I dread to meet his clear gaze! How irksome this close contact, with the rough rubs it gives to all my sore places! How I abhorred myself to-day as I went through the ghastly mimicries of prayer, and crossing myself, and genuflexion, in our little church. How I hate the sight of its sky-blue dome and its gilt minarets! When the pope brought me the Gospel to kiss, fiery shame coursed through my veins. And then when I saw the look of humble reverence on Paul's face as he pressed his lips to the silver-bound volume, my blood was frozen to ice. Strange, dead memories seemed to float about the incense-laden air; shadowy scenes; old, far-away cadences. And when the deacon walked past me with his bougie, there seemed to flash upon me some childish recollection of a joyous candle-bearing procession, whereat my eyes grew filled with sudden tears. The marble altar, the silver candlesticks, the glittering jewelled scene faded into mist. And then the choir sang, and under the music I grew calm again. After all, religions were made for men. And this one was just fitted for the simple muzhiks who dotted the benches with their stupid, good natured figures. They must have their gold-bedecked gods in painting and image; and their saints in gold brocade to kneel before at all hours to solace themselves with visions of a brocaded Paradise.
And yet what had I to do with these childish superstitions?—I whose race preached the great doctrine of the Unity to a world sunk in vice and superstition; whose childish lips were taught to utter the Shemang as soon as they could form the syllables; who know that the Christian creed is a monstrous delusion! To think that I have lent the sanction of my manhood to these grotesque beliefs. Grotesque, say I? when to Paul they are the essence of all lofty feeling and aspiration! And yet I know that he is blind, or sees things with that strange perversion of vision of which I have heard him accuse the Jews—my brethren. He believes what he has been taught. And who taught him? Bozhe moi! was it not I who have brought him up in these degrading beliefs, which he imagines I share? God! is this my punishment, that he is faithful to the creed taught him by a father who was faithless to his own? And yet there were excuses enough for me, Thou knowest. Why did these forms and ceremonies, which now loom beautiful to me through a mist of tears, seem hideous chains on the free limbs of childhood? Was it my father's fault or my own that the stereotyped routine of the day; that the being dragged out of bed in the gray dawn to go to synagogue, or to intone in monotonous sing-song the weary casuistries of the rabbis; that the endless precepts or prohibitions, made me conceive religion as the most hateful of tyrannies? Through the cloud of forty years I can but dimly recall the violence of the repulsion with which things Jewish inspired me—of how it galled me to feel that I was one of that detested race, that I was that mockery and byword, a Zhit; that, with little sympathy with my people, I was yet destined to partake of its burdens and its disabilities. Bitter as my soul is within me to-day, I can yet understand, can yet half excuse, that fatal mistake of ignorant and ambitious youth.
It were easy for me now to acknowledge myself a Jew, even with the risk of Siberia before me. I am rich, I have some of the education for which I longed, above all, I have lived. Ah, how differently the world, with its hopes and its fears, and its praise and censure, looks to the youth who is climbing slowly up the hill, and the man who is swiftly descending to the valley! But the knowledge of the vanity of all things comes too late; this, too, is vanity. Enough that I sacrificed the sincerity and reality of life for unrealities, which then seemed to me the only things worth having. There was none to counsel, and none to listen. I fled my home; I was baptized into the Church. At once all that hampered me was washed away. Before me stretched the free, open road of culture and well-being. I was no longer the slave of wanton laws, the laughing-stock of every Muscovite infant, liable to be kicked and cuffed and spat at by every true Russian. What mattered a lip-profession of Christianity, when I cared as little for Judaism as for it? I never looked back; my prior life faded quickly from my memory. Alone I fought the battle of life—alone, unaided by man or hope in God. A few lucky speculations on the Bourse, starting from the risking of the few kopecks amassed by tuition, rescued me from the need of pursuing my law-studies. I fell in love and married. Caterina, your lovely face came effectively between me and what vague visions of my past, what dim uneasiness of remorse, yet haunted me. You never knew—your family never knew—that I was not a Slav to the backbone. The new life lay fold on fold over the old; the primitive writing of the palimpsest was so thickly written over, that no thought of what I had once been troubled me during all those years of wedded life, made happier by your birth and growth, my Paul, my darling Paul; no voice came from those forgotten shores, save once, when—who knows through what impalpable medium?—I learnt or divined my father's death, and all the air was filled with hollow echoes of reproach. During those years I avoided contact with Jews as much as I could; when it was inevitable, I made the contact brief. The thought of the men, of their gabardines and their pious ringlets, of their studious dronings and their devout quiverings and wailings, of the women with their coarse figures and their unsightly wigs; the remembrance of their vulgar dialect, and their shuffling ways, and their accommodating morality, filled me with repulsion. As if to justify myself to myself, my mind conceived of them only in their meanest and tawdriest aspects. The black points alone caught my eye, and linked themselves into a perfect-seeming picture.
Da, I have been a good Russian, a good Christian. I have not stirred my little finger to help the Jews in their many and grievous afflictions. They were nothing to me. Over the vodka and the champagne I have joined in the laugh against them, without even feeling I was of them. Why, then, these strange sympathies that agitate me now; these feelings, shadowy, but strong and resistless as the shadow of death? Am I sane, or is this but incipient madness? Am I sinking into a literal second childhood, in which all the terrors and the sanctities that once froze or stirred my soul have come to possess me once more? Am I dying? I have heard that the scene of half a century ago may be more vivid to dying eyes than the chamber of death itself. Has Caterina's death left a blank which these primitive beloved memories rush in to fill up? Was it the light of her face that blinded me to the dear homely faces of my father and mother? If I had not met her, how would things have been? Should I have repented earlier of my hollow existence? Was it the genuineness of her faith in her heathen creed that made me acquiesce in its daily profession and its dominance in our household life? And are the old currents flowing so strongly now, only because they were so long artificially dammed up? Of what avail to ask myself these questions? I asked them yesterday and I shall be no wiser to-morrow. No man can analyze his own emotions, least of all I, unskilled to sound the depths of my soul, content if the surface be unruffled. Perhaps, after all, it is Paul who is the cause of the troubling of the waters, which yet I am glad have not been left in their putrid stagnation. For since Caterina's clay-cold form was laid in the Moscow churchyard, and Paul and I have been brought the nearer together for the void, my son has opened my eyes to my baseness. The light that radiates from his own terrible nobleness has shown me how black and polluted a soul is mine. My whole life has been shuffled through under false colours. Even if I shared few of the Jew's beliefs, it should have been my duty—and my proud duty—to proclaim myself of the race. If, as I fondly believed, I was superior to my people, then it behoved me to allow that superiority to be counted to their credit and to the honour of the Jewish flag. My poor brethren, sore indeed has been your travail, and your cry of pain pierces the centuries. Perhaps—who knows?—I could have helped a little if I had been faithful, as faithful as Paul will be to his own ideals. Ah, if Paul had been a Jew—! My God! is Paul a Jew? Have I upon my shoulders the guilt of this loss to Judaism, too?
Analyze myself, reproach myself, doubt my own sanity how I may, one thing is clear. From the bottom of my heart I long, I yearn, I burn to return to the religion of my childhood. I long to say and to sing the Hebrew words that come scantily and with effort to my lips. I long to join my brethren at prayer, to sit with them in the synagogue, in the study, at the table; to join them in their worship and at their meals; to share with them their joys and sorrows, their wrongs and their inner delights. Laugh at myself how I will, I long to bind my arm and brow with the phylacteries of old and to wrap myself in my fringed shawl, and to abase myself in the dust before the God of Israel; nay, to don the greasy gabardine at which I have mocked, and to let my hair grow even as theirs. As yet this is all but a troubled aspiration, but it is irresistible and must work itself out in deeds. It cannot be argued with. The wind bloweth as it listeth; who shall say why I am tempest-tossed?
Monday Night.—Paul has retired to rest to rise early to-morrow for the journey to Moscow. For something has happened to alter his plans, and he goes thither instead of to the capital. He is sleeping the sleep of the young, the hopeful, and the joyous. Ach, that what gives him joy should be to me—; but let me write down all. This morning at breakfast Paul received a letter, which he read with a cry of astonishment and joy. "Look, little father, look," he exclaimed, handing it to me. I read, trying to disguise my own feelings and to sympathize with his gladness. It was a letter from a firm of well-known publishers in Moscow, offering to publish a work on the Greek Church, the MS. of which he had submitted to them.