Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories (29 page)

Come to think of it again, though, writing is not for everyone. We should all stick to what we work at for a living, that’s my opinion, because each of us has to make one. And if you don’t work at anything, that’s work too.

Still, since we travelers often spend whole days on end sitting and looking out the window until we want to bang our heads against the wall, one day I had an idea: I went and bought myself a pencil and a notebook and began jotting down everything I saw and heard on my trips. I don’t mean to boast, but you can see for yourself that I’ve gathered quite a lot of material. Why, it might take you a whole year just to read it all. What, I wondered, should I do with it? It would be a crime to throw it away. Why not, I thought, publish it in a newspaper or a book? God knows that worse stuff gets into print.

And so I sat down and sorted out my goods, throwing out whatever wasn’t up to scratch and keeping only the very best quality, which I divided up into stories—story number one, story number two, and so on, giving each a proper name to make it more professional. I have no idea if I’ll turn a profit on this
venture or end up losing my shirt. Quite frankly, I’ll be happy to break even.

But whatever possessed me, you ask, to invest in such a business in the first place? For the life of me, I can’t tell you the answer. Maybe it was a ridiculous thing to do, but there’s no going back on it now. I did take one precaution, though, and that’s against the critics, because I’ve kept my real name a secret. They can try guessing it till they burst! Let them criticize, let them laugh at me, let them climb the walls all they want—it will bother me
as much as a catcall on Purim bothers Haman. After all, I’m no scribbler, no ten-o’clock-scholar begging for a job—I’m a commercial traveler and I pay my own way!

COMPETITORS

A
lways, right in the middle of the worst pandemonium, when Jews are pushing to get in and out and fighting for each seat as though it were in the front row of the synagogue, there the two of them are: him and her.

He’s squat, dark, unkempt, with a cataract in one eye. She’s redheaded, gaunt, and pockmarked. Both are dressed in old rags, both have patches on their shoes, and both are carrying the same thing: a basket. His basket is full of braided rolls, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and bottled seltzer water. Her basket is full of braided rolls, hard-boiled eggs, oranges, and bottled seltzer water too.

Sometimes he turns up with bags of red or black cherries and green grapes sour as vinegar. Then she also turns up with red or black cherries and green grapes sour as vinegar.

Both always appear together, fight to get through the same door of the same car, and give the same sales spiel, though with different manners of speaking. His is liquid, as though his tongue were melting in his mouth. Hers is lisping, as though her tongue kept getting in her way.

Maybe you think they undersell one another, vie for customers, war over prices? Not a chance! They charge the same amount for everything. The competition between them consists solely of seeing who can make you feel sorrier for whom. Both beg you to have pity on their five orphaned children (his five are motherless, hers have no father) while looking you right in the eye; both shove their goods in your face; and both talk such a blue streak at you that you end up buying something whether you meant to or not.

The trouble is that all their wheedling and whining leaves you confused. Whose customer should you be, his or hers? Because if you think you can get around it by buying from each, they quickly disabuse you of the notion. “Look here, mister,” they tell you, “you either buy from one or the other. You can’t dance at two weddings at once!”

Worse yet, try to be fair and take turns, once him and once her, and you’ll get it from them both. “What’s the matter, mister,” she’ll say, “don’t you like my dress today?” Or else he says to you, “Mister! Just last week you bought from me. Do you mean to tell me my goods poisoned you?”

If you harbor humanitarian sentiments, moreover, and start preaching to them that each is a human being who has to eat—in a word, that they should live and let live, as the English like to say—they’ll answer you right back, and not in English either, but in a simple Yiddish that may sound a wee bit cryptic though it’s really quite understandable: “Brother! You can’t ride one ass to two fairs!”

You see how it is, my dear friends. There’s no pleasing everyone. It’s hopeless even to try, and the more you play the peacemaker, the less peaceful things become. That’s something I know from experience. In fact, I could tell you a good one about how once I was foolish enough to butt in on a married couple in order to make up between them—the outcome of which was that I took it on the chin from my own wife! I don’t want to digress, though. True, it happens even in business that you sometimes put aside one thing to talk about all kinds of others, in fact, about everything under the sun; but we had better get back to our story.

One rainy day in autumn when the sky was weeping buckets and a black pall hung over everything, the station was crawling
with people. Passengers kept piling in and out, all of them hurrying, all of them jostling, and most of all, of course, our Jews. Everyone was climbing over everyone with suitcases and packages and bundles made of bedclothes. And the noise, the sheer commotion—what a racket! Just then, in the midst of all this bedlam, there they were: him and her, both loaded down with edibles as usual. As usual, too, both hurled themselves through the same door of the train at once. Only then … goodness me, what had happened? Suddenly both baskets were on the ground and all the rolls and eggs and oranges and seltzer bottles were rolling about in the mud to an uproar of shouts, shrieks, tears, and curses mingled with the laughter of the conductors and the din of the passengers. A bell rang, the train whistled, and in another minute we were off.

There was a babble of voices in the car. Our fellow Israelites were giving their tongues an airing, everyone gabbling together like women in a synagogue or geese in the marketplace. So many different conversations were going on all at once that one could only make out snatches of each.

“What a massacre of rolls!”

“What a pogrom of eggs!”

“What did he have against those oranges?”

“Why ask? A goy is a goy!”

“How much would you say all that food was worth?”

“It serves them right! It’s time they stopped getting on everyone’s nerves.”

“But what do you want from them? A Jew has to make a living.”

“Ha ha, that’s a good one!” said a thick bass voice. “What Jews don’t call making a living!”

“What’s wrong with how Jews make a living?” piped a squeaky voice. “Do you have any better ways to make one? Why don’t you tell us about them!”

“I wasn’t talking to you, young fellow!” the bass voice thundered.

“You weren’t? But I’m talking to you. Do you have any better ways to make a living?… Well, why don’t you say something? Speak up!”

“Will somebody please tell me what this young man wants from me?”

“What do I want from you? You don’t like how Jews make a living, so I’m asking you to tell us a better way. Let’s hear it!”

“Just look how he’s leeched on to me!”

“Shhh, all of you! Stop talking about it. Here she comes.”

“Who?”

“The basket woman.”

“Where? Where is our beauty queen?”

“Right over there!”

Pockmarked and redheaded, her eyes puffy with tears, she struggled through the passengers looking for a place until she finally sat down on her overturned basket, hid her face in her tattered shawl, and resumed crying silently into it.

An odd hush came over the car. Everyone stopped talking. No one let out a peep. Except, that is, for one person, who called out in a heavy bass voice:

“Jews! Why so quiet?”

“What’s there to shout about?” someone asked.

“Let’s pass the hat around!”

So help me! And do you know who the kind heart was? None other than the same character who had laughed at how Jews make a living, a queer-looking fellow with a queer-looking flat, glossy-brimmed cap and blue-tinted glasses that hid his eyes completely: there simply were none to be seen above his fat, fleshy bulb of a nose. Without further ado he took the cap from his head, threw a few silver coins into it, and went from one passenger to another, booming in his bass voice:

“Give what you can, children! All donations are welcome.
Darovanomu konyu vzuby nye smotryat
—that means, according to
Rashi, that we won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Folks began rummaging through their pockets and purses, and all sorts of coins, both silver and copper, were soon clinking in the cap. There was even a Christian there, a Russian with high boots and a silver chain around his neck, who yawned, crossed himself, and gave something too. In the whole car one passenger alone refused to part with a kopeck—and that, of all people, was the very same individual who had taken up the cudgel for Jewish livings, an intellectual-looking young man with pasty cheeks, a pointy yellow beard, and gold pince-nez on his nose. You could see he was one of those types with rich parents and in-laws who travel third class to economize.

“Young fellow,” said the Jew with the blue glasses and big nose, “let’s have something for the hat.”

“I’m not giving,” said our intellectual.

“Why not?”

“Because. It’s a matter of principle with me.”

“You didn’t have to tell me that.”

“Why not?”

“Because
vedno pana po kholavakh
—that means, according to Rashi, that you can tell a rotten apple by its peel.”

The young man flared up so that he almost lost his pince-nez. “You’re an ignoramus!” he squeaked furiously at the man with the blue glasses. “You’re a cheeky, insolent, impudent, impertinent illiterate!”

“Thank God I’m all of that and not a two-legged animal that oinks,” answered the man with the big nose in a surprisingly good-natured tone of voice before turning to the puffy-eyed woman and saying, “There, there, Auntie, don’t you think you’ve cried enough? You’ll ruin your pretty eyes if you don’t stop. Here, hold out your hands and I’ll fill them with a bit of spare change.”

A strange woman if ever there was one! You might have thought that, seeing all the cash, she would have thanked him from the bottom of her heart. In fact she did nothing of the sort. Instead of thanks, a volley of oaths spewed forth from her. She was a veritable fountain of them.

“It’s all his fault. I hope he breaks his neck! I pray to God he breaks every bone in his body! He’s to blame for everything—I only wish, dear Father in heaven, that everything happens to him! He shouldn’t live to cross his own threshold! He should die a hundred times from a fire, from a fever, from an earthquake, from a plague, from an ill wind that carries him away! He should croak! He should burst! He should dry up like a puddle! He should swell like a dead fish!”

Good Lord, where did one person get so many curses from? It was a lucky thing that the man with the blue glasses interrupted her and said:

“That’s enough of your kind wishes, my good woman. Why don’t you tell us why the conductors had it in for you?”

The woman looked at him with her puffy eyes.

“I only hope he gets a stroke! He was afraid I’d take his customers away, so he tried pushing ahead of me, so I elbowed him out of the way, so he grabbed my basket from behind, so I started to
scream, so a policeman came along and winked to the conductors, so they threw both our baskets in the mud. God turn his blood to mud! I swear to you, may I hope to die if I’ve ever been bothered before or had a hair harmed on my head in all the years I’ve been working this line. Do you know why that is? It’s not from the milk of human kindness, believe me. He should only get a box in the ear for each free roll and hard-boiled egg I’ve handed out in that station! Everyone, from top to bottom, has to get his share of the pie. I hope to God they get all of it some day: one of them consumption, another a fever, another the cholera! The chief conductor takes what he wants, and the other conductors help themselves too to a roll, or an egg, or an orange. What can I tell you? Would you believe that even the stoker, a pox on his head, thinks he has a bite coming? I wish his ears were bitten off! He keeps threatening to rat on me to the policeman unless I give him something to eat. If only he knew, may the gout get his bones, that the policeman gets a cut too. Every Sunday I slip him a bagful of oranges to buy him off for the week. And don’t think he doesn’t choose the biggest, the sweetest, the juiciest fruit …”