The Tiger in the Well Read Online Free PDF

come to England. The man there—British—asked me a number of questions, looked at my papers, then made me
    {

    The Journalist ZJ
    pay a fee and wrote my name in a book. It would guarantee me residence in London for three months, he said. There were dozens of people there; some of them couldn't pay, they had no money left. They'd had to face this kind of thing all the way from Kiev. A transit fee in Moscow, a registration pass somewhere else, a particular stamp in their passport at the frontier—it went on and on; every time they moved, they had to pay someone a fee."
    "The Tzaddik," prompted Goldberg.
    "Ah, yes. The comrade I was with told me about him. It seems that the people—rthe Jews—are all afraid of some mysterious figure they call the Tzaddik; as if their misfortunes—all these obstructions in their way, all the fraud and the persecution—^were all the work of this one man. But, you see, they're superstitious, they think he's . . . not human. From the villages out in the shtetl to the slums of Warsaw and Bucharest and Vienna, they all talk of the Tzaddik as if he were a demon, something supernatural. They say he has a dybbuk for a servant: a little imp from hell that waits on him. They call him Tzaddik—righteous one, saint, holy man—^as a way of keeping the evil at bay, like a kind of desperate joke. When I first heard that sort of talk I threw up my hands: what can you do with rank superstition.? But now . . . well, I've seen him, Goldberg. I think they're right.
    "It happened like this: My comrade in Riga took me to a warehouse in the docks that overlooked the gangplank of a steamship. This was late at night; the docks had been closed earlier in the evening, and if we'd been caught, we'd have gone to prison. We were going to see the Tzaddik boarding the steamer. It was very secret; no one usually sees him, because he always travels at night. We waited there till past midnight, and then a carriage rolled up beside the gangplank.
    "It was a big, luxurious carriage, strongly made, heavily built. We couldn't see them unloading him from where we were, but—"
    "Unloading him.'"' said Goldberg.

    "You'll see. When the carriage moved away, there he was on the gangplank, being hauled up by two sailors and pushed up by two footmen. He's in a wheelchair. Immensely fat. A servant close-by, holding a rug or something. And—I don't care if you don't believe this—I saw the dybbuk.''
    Goldberg looked up. Liebermann's face was tense, and he'd nearly finished the brandy. Goldberg poured some more, and Liebermann went on. "A little shadow like a cat—the size of a cat—but human. A homunculus, like the medieval magicians used to make in those old stories. Skipping and running up the gangplank after him. ..."
    He closed his eyes and sighed, trembling.
    "Anyway, they took the man on board and then lifted up the carriage, too, with a crane. And I left, with my comrade, and came on overland to Rotterdam. That was where I next heard of the Tzaddik. It was on board the ship, the night we sailed. I was on the deck—the air below was filthy and full of smoke—and I was trying to get warm behind some kind of lifeboat. And I heard two men talking. The ship's engine was turning over; I could feel the throbbing in the bulkhead behind me—is that the word.'* It was near the chimney— funnel—and I could see the lights of the city behind the customs shed. I was huddled down there under my raincoat, and I saw the men's outline against the sky, leaning on the rail. They were speaking in English.
    "One of them said, 'Fifty-six passengers at five guilders each. Two hundred and eighty guilders. You owe me ten percent—twenty-eight.' I recognized his voice: he was the official who'd stamped the papers for the passengers to come on board.
    "The other man said, 'You never said ten percent. We agreed on five.'
    "The official said, 'The price has gone up. This is the last run we can do from Rotterdam like this; the authorities are