"By the way, Herr Eichelkatz, I wanted to ask you something that is of personal interest to me. Who is Herr Jonas Goldstücker?"
He looked at me slyly.
"Are you trying to provide for a spiritual after-life, which will manifest itself in your children and grandchildren?" He repeated my words with a touch of irony in the intonation. "And Herr Jonas Goldstücker is to help you on to immortality?"
"We haven't reached that point yet, Herr Eichelkatz," I answered laughing, rejoiced that I had made him think of other things. Without his noticing it, I turned the conversation upon my colleagues in the place, especially Sanitätsrat Ehrlich.
"I don't know the people of to-day very well, Herr Kreisphysikus. Since I gave up my business I haven't bothered myself much about them. The present Sanitätsrat Ehrlich is the son of the Sanitätsrat Ehrlich who was one of the trustees along with Dr. Krakauer. He studied at the same time as my son. And when Ehrlich had finished his course, he established himself here and took up his father's practice. He married and reached a position of prominence and wealth in the same place as his father, who has been dead ten years. If that's what you mean by after-life, Herr Doktor, then the old Sanitätsrat Ehrlich actually does live on in his son. They say the son uses the very same prescriptions as his father. He's not a shining light; but he's a fine, respected man. I believe in time he was made trustee, like his father; and he has children, sons and daughters, who are a satisfaction to him. His oldest son is also studying medicine, and will probably some time take up his father's prescriptions and his practice. The old Sanitätsrat Ehrlich was no shining light, and neither is his son, and I don't know the young one at all—but, at any rate, their light burns a long time, like a Yom Kippur light, and in the Khille it may be said of this family: Ehrlich währt am längsten."
He smiled, and was pleased at his own little joke, and I for my part was glad to have left him in a better mood than I had found him.
November 18.
My old friend grows perceptibly weaker. There are no symptoms of a definite trouble but senectus morbus ipsa. The nasty cold penetrates the chinks at door and window and settles in some corner of the room, however carefully warmed and provided against weather. The very time of year prepares mischief for an old, decaying body. If Simon were sitting in some sunny spot, who knows if his seventy-eight years would be oppressing him so? What remarkable old people I saw in the south, especially in Rome. They bore their eighty or ninety years with proud dignity and fine carriage. We of the north age much more rapidly; perhaps we are not even born young. Especially we Jews! Conditions have been bettered in the course of time, since our young people have been allowed to benefit by the sanitary, hygienic, and æsthetic achievements of modern life. They all devote themselves to sports, and the obligation to serve in the army has forced them—and the need therefor is highly significant—to practice gymnastic exercises to their advantage. Nevertheless they have something old, thoughtful, worldly-wise in their souls. It is the heritage of the many thousands of years of culture, the culture which has won us renown and singled us out among the nations, but has burdened us also and weighted us down with the over-thoughtfulness born of limitless life-experience. Naïveté and an easy mode of existence we have lost through this heritage; and that it manifests itself especially in spiritual matters is praiseworthy, though neither gratifying nor exhilarating. How difficult we are! How dependent upon tradition! What deep roots we have struck in the soil of the past! I believe we drag the chains of our long history more painfully than those put upon us by the other nations. And though these chains are wrought of the gold of fidelity and linked with the pearls of wisdom, they weight us down—they weight us down in a world where we are only tolerated—strangers!
Simon Eichelkatz awakened these thoughts in me. Yesterday he told me a great deal again. Remarkable! It is as though he felt the need to unburden his soul of a few more matters before he sinks into the great, eternal silence. But he doesn't suspect my anxiety in his behalf. He chats on heedlessly into the twilight of the early winter evenings. The twilight makes people communicative and confidential. It is the time of intimate secrets. And at such a time Simon acquainted me with the most solemn experience of his life.
"I do not know, Herr Kreisphysikus, how to tell you—when I found it out, I felt a pain as though a piece of my body were being torn away. It hurt! My, how it hurt! I cried aloud! I made a rent in my coat; I threw myself on the ground, and I sat Shiveh. My son was dead, my only child! Madame Eichelkatz said nothing. She remained immovable. Not a sound passed her lips; and to this day I do not know what she thought or felt when the news came that our only child had been—baptized! He had had himself baptized, Herr Kreisphysikusleben. Converted! Stepped from one religion into another as lightly as though stepping from the middle of the street over the gutter onto the pavement! From the painful, dusty road to the elegant, smoothly-paved street!