The Perfect Tense

by Hermann Steinthal, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The court's translation lay on the table in the corridor of the Landgericht at Posen, under a glass paperweight that someone had set there to keep it from the draught. It was one sheet in the clerk's round hand, and it began: Ich, Salomon Sohn des Jakob, habe dir, Itzig Sohn des Mendel, verkauft zwei Pferde, braun, und einen Leiterwagen mit Zubehör, um neunhundert Mark, und das Geld habe ich aus deiner Hand empfangen.

Moritz Gutfeld, teacher of Hebrew and German at the community school off the Wronker Straße, read it standing, with his gloves still on. The translation was correct in every word. There was nothing in it a schoolmaster could mark in red. That was the difficulty.

He had the original in his breast pocket, a copy he had made himself, because the court kept the deed. Eleven lines of square Hebrew, two signatures of witnesses, a date. He did not need to take it out. The first word of the operative clause was makharti, and the clerk had written habe verkauft, and both were in what the grammars of his boyhood called the perfect, and the German perfect and the Hebrew perfect had no more in common than two men who happen to be called Cohn.

It was Thursday, the twenty-second of January 1885. The stove at the end of the corridor had been lit at seven and had not yet reached the benches. A woman in a Polish shawl sat with a basket on her knees. Two clerks passed with files tied in pink tape. Gutfeld had been summoned for ten as Sachverständiger: expert, sworn, three marks for the morning and his tram fare. It was a quarter to.

---

Itzig Pinner had come to the school eleven days before, in the hour after the boys went home, and had stood in the door of the classroom turning his hat until Gutfeld asked him in.

Pinner dealt in hides at Schrimm. He was a broad man with a cough, and he smelled faintly of the lime they use in tanning, which no amount of brushing takes out of a coat. He had the deed with him then. He laid it on the master's desk beside the inkwell, open, and pressed it flat with both hands as if it might get away.

"You read this for the court," he said. "They told me it would be you. The Polish interpreter does not read Hebrew, and the rabbi will not go into a Prussian court for a matter of horses."

"I have been asked, yes."

"Then you will tell them what it says."

"I will tell them what it says."

Pinner nodded, as though that settled it, and then did not go. He explained, in Yiddish and then in German when he found Gutfeld answering him in German, what everybody in Schrimm already knew. His sister's husband, Salomon Brill, carted grain to the Warthe barges and had carted it at a loss for two years. In July Brill had come to him for nine hundred marks. Pinner had given them, in notes, in the back room behind the hides, with no one present but the two of them and a cat. For this, Brill was to have the use of the horses until the harvest was in, and then the horses and the wagon were Pinner's.

"In July," Pinner said. "The money was July. Ask anybody."

"And the deed?"

"The deed was later. When things were bad. My sister said, write it down, Salomon, so there is something on paper. So he wrote it down." He touched the date with one thick finger. "But it says makharti. I have sold. It is already done when he writes it. Anybody can see that. Even the clerk sees that: habe verkauft. It is the past."

On Monday the tenth of November, Salomon Brill had stopped paying his creditors. On the following Thursday he had sat in the room of the shochet at Schrimm with two witnesses and written this deed. In December the court had opened bankruptcy proceedings upon his estate and appointed a lawyer, Rechtsanwalt Tiede, to gather it in. Tiede had found the horses in Pinner's stable and the deed in Pinner's drawer. A sale made after a man stops paying, to his wife's brother, who could not help knowing why he stopped: that the administrator may undo. A sale made in July, before the trouble, he may not.

"So you see," Pinner said, "it is a question of one word."

Gutfeld had looked at the date. Kaf-he of Cheshvan, 5645. He had not needed a calendar. He remembered the week, because it had been the week of Chayei Sarah, and he had given the third class the purchase of the cave of Machpelah to construe for the Sabbath.

"It is not quite a question of one word," he said.

"What else?"

Gutfeld could have told him. He could have said that the word Pinner was resting his weight on would not carry a man across the street, let alone back four months to July. He said instead that he would read the deed to the court as it was written. Pinner put on his hat in the classroom, which no one did, and went out. At the door he said, without turning, "You are a Jew, Herr Gutfeld."

"I am a teacher of grammar," Gutfeld said, but Pinner was already on the stairs, and it was not the reply he would have liked to make in any case.

---

The courtroom was the second civil chamber, high and pale green, with a portrait of the old Kaiser over the bench. Landgerichtsrat Hake presided with two associate judges, one of whom was reading something else. Rechtsanwalt Tiede sat at a table on the left with his papers squared. Pinner's lawyer, a young man named Lewin who had come down from Breslau, sat on the right beside Pinner, who had put on a black coat for the occasion and still smelled of lime.

Gutfeld was sworn. He gave his name, his age, which was forty-four, his post, his religion. Hake had the clerk's translation in front of him and the deed beside it.

"Herr Gutfeld. You have compared the court's translation with the original?"

"I have, Herr Landgerichtsrat."

"Is it accurate?"

"Every word is a correct German word for the Hebrew word that stands beside it."

Hake looked at him over his spectacles. He was a careful man; Gutfeld had been told so, and it showed in the way he waited. "That is an expert's answer. Is the translation accurate?"

"As a list of words, yes. As a statement, it says one thing the Hebrew does not say."

Tiede made a note. Lewin did not.

"Explain."

Gutfeld had prepared this on the horse tram, and had then thrown the preparation away on the stairs, because it began with Humboldt and ended in the Psalms, and the court had a list of eleven other matters for the morning.

"In German," he said, "when I say ich habe verkauft, I place the selling behind me in time. Before now. Yesterday, last July, it makes no difference, but before the moment I am speaking. German asks first of every action: when? The verb cannot be put into a German sentence without answering it.

"The Hebrew form here does not ask when. It asks whether. Is the act finished, whole, closed? Or is it still going on, still to come, still open? Makharti says: the selling is complete. It does not say when it was completed. The clerk had to choose a German tense, because German gives him no form that has no time in it. He chose the past, which is what the grammars teach. The grammars were written by men who learned Latin first."

The associate judge who had been reading something else looked up.

"Then what time does it mean?" Hake said.

"Whatever time the sentence stands in. Sometimes the past, certainly. In a story, he went, he said. But in a deed—" Gutfeld stopped. "May I give the court an example from a text the court will know?"

"If it is short."

"Genesis twenty-three. Abraham wishes to buy a field and a cave from Ephron the Hittite, to bury Sarah. They are standing at the gate of the town before all the people. Ephron says, in the Hebrew, ha-sadeh natati lakh: the field, I have given it to you. The same form as here. Natati. Luther puts ich schenke dir den Acker: I give you the field. The English Bible has the field give I thee. Neither of them puts it in the past, and they are right, because Ephron has not given anything yet. They are still bargaining. He is saying it, there, at the gate, and the saying is the giving, or it is meant to sound so. Then he names a price. Four hundred shekels of silver. Abraham weighs it out. And only then, the text says, the field was made sure to Abraham, before the eyes of all who went in at the gate."

"So the word means the present."

"The word means done. In a contract, done means done by these words, now, before these witnesses. The German for this deed is not ich habe dir verkauft. It is hiermit verkaufe ich dir. Herewith I sell."

There was a small silence. Lewin's pen, which had been still, moved. Pinner had turned his head and was looking at Gutfeld with an expression Gutfeld had seen on boys who have just understood that the master is not going to help them with the answer.

Tiede rose. He was a lean man with a dry voice, and he did not gloat, which Gutfeld noted in his favour.

"Then the expert is telling the court that this document does not record an earlier sale. It makes the sale. On the date it bears."

"I am telling the court that the verb does not record an earlier sale. The verb cannot prove July."

"And the date?"

"The date is the twenty-fifth of Cheshvan, five thousand six hundred and forty-five. Thursday, the thirteenth of November last."

"Three days after the debtor suspended payment."

"So I understand."

Tiede sat down.

Lewin rose. He was young, but not stupid, and he had listened. "Herr Gutfeld. You say the verb cannot prove July. Can it prove November? Can it prove that nothing passed between these men before the thirteenth?"

Gutfeld considered this. It was a better question than any he had been asked so far.

"No. The verb says the selling is complete in this writing. It does not say what came before the writing. A man may receive the money in July and complete the sale in November. The deed itself has another clause: ve-ha-kesef kibbalti mi-yadkha. And the money I have received from your hand. Same form. It does not say when the money came. Only that, on this Thursday, before these witnesses, Brill said it had come."

"So the money may have come in July."

"The grammar is silent about July. I can only tell the court what the grammar says. What happened in a back room at Schrimm, the court must find out from people who were there."

"Only the cat was there," Pinner said, quite loudly, and Hake rapped once with his pencil.

Lewin sat down. He wrote something on a slip of paper and pushed it to Pinner, who did not read it.

It was then that the second associate judge, the one who had been reading, leaned forward. He had a soft, interested face.

"One question, if the presiding judge permits. It is a matter of general knowledge, is it not, that the Oriental peoples have a weaker sense of time than we do? That their languages reflect a mind that lives in a kind of eternal present? I have read something of the sort. One would then expect such a document to be careless about sequence."

Gutfeld had heard this sentence, in some form, at every stage of his education, once from a professor at Breslau who had been kind to him.

"With respect, Herr Landgerichtsrat, the document is not careless about sequence. It has a date to the day. The debtor wrote it, two witnesses signed it, and every one of them knew that the tenth of November came before the thirteenth. The Hebrew language asks first whether a thing is done, where German asks first when. That is a difference in where the speaker looks. It is not a defect of the eyes. The same men who wrote makharti keep a calendar more complicated than the Prussian one: it has a leap month, which they insert seven times in nineteen years, and they have never once mistaken a Thursday for a Monday."

The associate judge sat back, not offended, as though a book had disagreed with him.

Hake asked the clerk to strike habe ich dir verkauft from the translation and write, at the expert's dictation, verkaufe ich dir hiermit, and in the money clause habe ich empfangen was to stand, with a note in the margin that the Hebrew form fixed the receipt as complete at the date of the deed and expressed no earlier date. Gutfeld dictated the note slowly, and the clerk read it back to him, and it was right. The clerk drew a line through the old words with a ruler. He left them legible under the line, as the regulations require.

Gutfeld signed the protocol. He was dismissed with thanks. Pinner's matter was adjourned to a date in February for the hearing of witnesses as to July, of whom, as everybody knew, there were none.

---

Pinner was in the corridor by the stove, which had warmed by now. He did not come towards Gutfeld. Gutfeld went to him.

"You could have said it was the past," Pinner said. "Who in that room could say otherwise? The clerk? The Kaiser?"

"Herr Tiede would have found a second expert by February. There is a professor at Breslau who would have said exactly what I said. With more Latin."

"So it was for nothing."

"It was not for anything. It was what the word says."

Pinner coughed into his fist. "My sister's husband," he said, "sat in the shochet's room and wrote I have sold because he thought it would make it older. He thought the same as me. He thought the Hebrew would carry it back to July."

"I know."

"Two horses. They are not even good horses. One of them bites."

He put on his hat, in the corridor of the Landgericht, and went down the stairs.

---

The next morning, before the first lesson, the third class had Genesis twenty-three again, because the district school inspector was coming in March and would ask for a passage construed, and Gutfeld kept the passages the boys had done well. Twelve boys, slates, a coal fire, the smell of wet wool.

He had Leib Brodsky read verse eleven aloud and then put it into German word by word.

"No, my lord, hear me, the field I have given to you, and the cave that is in it, to you I have given it—"

"Stop. When did Ephron give Abraham the field?"

Leib looked at the verse. The rest of the class looked at Leib.

"Before," he said. "It says natati. He has given."

"Before what?"

Leib looked again. He was a careful boy, a carter's son, and he moved his lips over the next verses without sound. Abraham bowing. The money named. Four hundred shekels, current money with the merchant.

"He hasn't given it yet," Leib said slowly. "He is still talking. Abraham hasn't paid."

"Then why does Ephron say natati?"

Leib frowned. A boy at the back put up his hand and Gutfeld ignored him.

"Because when he says it," Leib said, "it's — it is meant to be finished. Already. So Abraham can't say no."

"And when did Abraham have the field?"

"When he paid. Verse sixteen." Leib found it with his finger. "Va-yishkol. He weighed."

"Write it on your slate," Gutfeld said. "The price."

Leib wrote 400 on the slate, and then, because he was a carter's son and had been taught to check a sum before he let it go, he drew a line under it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Hermannō Steinthal per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Hermann Steinthal, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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