The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (12 page)

With wistful sorrow in her blue eyes she stared vaguely ahead in the direction of the mist-covered fields for a while longer, unexpectedly twisted her lips into a grimace, and glanced round at Lipkis.

—It makes no difference now … —she indicated the deep darkness all around—so they’d better go straight from here to drink tea with the midwife Schatz.

Apparently she was also more than a little depressed, and in such a mood evidently had no desire to return home and pass the entire evening alone there.

In silence they crossed the left side of the deserted promenade on the outskirts of the shtetl and followed the well-worn, snow-covered footpath that led diagonally across to the peasant houses at the farthest end of the town, to those same peasant houses that encircled the northwestern corner of the town where they stood like sentries protecting it from the night and from the vacant fields that opened up immediately behind their unseeing rear walls.

Night had fallen, and in the pale gloom the snow dazzled the eye too greatly. Far, far away in the village a great many dogs met the approaching darkness with suspicious barking and recounted fearful primordial tales about the vast surrounding vacancy of fields:

—The Angel of Death lurks in the darkness over there … Death awaits whomsoever dares leave the shtetl to come here at nightfall.

Now, through the darkness, the last peasant cottage came into view, the semidetached dwelling in the left half of which, for the past two years, the Lithuanian midwife Schatz had dwelt peaceably with her peasant landlady. From the yellow ochre–smeared wall at the rear, her sole illuminated window now shed a ruddy glow deep, deep into the vast expanse of fields, glanced out at the sledges sliding silently home to bed from somewhere far away, and awakened in them lingering, cheerless, weary thoughts:

—There are certainly many unhappy people, all troubled and discontented. But as for living … in one way or another one can still go on living in a deserted and distant corner of a village, all alone and out of sight, smiling ironically, as the twenty-seven-year-old Lithuanian midwife Schatz did behind this window’s ruddy glow.

In a long, dark wool peignoir fastened with two blue ribbons tied diagonally in a broad bow above her breast, the midwife Schatz lay on her bed smoking a cigarette and thinking about something with an ironical smile.

She was always smoking a cigarette and thinking about something with an ironical smile, the midwife Schatz. At the little table that held the lamp sat the short pharmacist’s assistant
*
Safyan, his normally pale face drained of even more color, staring with great resentment into the flame of the lamp with his bulging, colorless eyes.

Under the table his knee twitched nervously. Not long before, with great seriousness, he’d voiced an opinion he held:

—Whenever he saw a woman smoking, his first thought was that here was an individual dependent on liquor.

Even for a moment the midwife Schatz ought to have given some thought to what he’d said and made some reply. But all she did was to listen attentively to the courtyard where the dog was harassing someone, rise from the bed and, without removing the cigarette from her lips, smile at Mirel and Lipkis who were coming in. So why did he need to sit there with his knee twitching under the table?

He actually rose from the chair wanting to take his leave, but Mirel had already cast an astonished glance first at the midwife and then at him, delayed taking off her overcoat, and from a distance demanded of him:

—What was he doing here? Was he really so afraid of the priest’s son-in-law, the pharmacist?

So he, the neurotic, stayed on a little longer and, still feeling insulted, was obliged to listen to the way the midwife Schatz, without looking at him and blowing her cigarette smoke toward the low ceiling, joked with Mirele about her own life:

—To tell the truth, it wasn’t only her present guests who said so … All of her acquaintances who called on her looked around and remarked that she certainly lived well. But she knew this far better than anyone else. What more was there to say? She regarded herself as supremely fortunate …

Each time Mirel paid some attention to the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan on the other side of the room, the midwife, seated on the bed, moved the whole of her bulky frame closer to Lipkis and, staring at the wall, nudged him in the ribs with her elbow:

—Lipkis! … Too bad for you, Lipkis!

In this way, clearly, she was hinting that she knew everything that was going on between him and Mirele, chuckling inwardly and soundlessly as she did so. The infuriated Lipkis almost burst with vexation and finally bellowed:

—Who gave you the right? … How dare you pry into my most intimate feelings?

In response, the young pharmacist’s assistant Safyan found his knee starting to twitch even more violently under the table, so that he finally announced nervously:

—He had to leave … Eventually he’d have to go back to the pharmacy, after all.

And off he went, alone with his nervous, bulging eyes. It seemed as though the slightest movement of a finger near those eyes would instantly make them pop from their sockets.

Of him the midwife Schatz remarked:

—A foolish young man … all in all, a foolish young man.

And she immediately forgot about him and went on talking about herself:

—Earlier that week, at the sickbed of someone she knew, she’d met the extremely busy Dr. Kraszewski and told him: I’ll marry you, doctor, if you’ll come with me now to one of my poor women in childbed.

Such was the nature of this bulky young woman with her smoothly combed hair and mobile, cheerful features: she could tell ironic stories about herself for hours without ever touching on her innermost life by so much as a single word. She’d probably inherited this disposition from her Lithuanian kin, so that, looking at her and thinking about this unknown family, what came hazily to mind was her eighty-two-year-old grandmother, a diminutive old woman as scrawny as a bird who’d come on a visit the previous summer and spent two successive months living in this room.

For long hot days on end, this little old creature lay propped up high on the pillows of the bed with her eyes shut, expiring from afar, like some harried and exhausted foreign parrot which, no longer able to endure the longing for its old home, constantly dreamed about the distant country across the seas where it had been born. It seemed as though she dozed for weeks in one long birdlike reverie, heard nothing of what took place around her, and didn’t even notice the young people from the shtetl who called on her granddaughter and discussed a variety of interests. Some of them were even certain that the old woman was deaf and senile and hadn’t spoken for a great many years.

On one occasion, however, a number of young people had been sitting here, theorizing at great length about themselves and their lives, and had then fallen silent for some time. Quite suddenly, all were greatly startled and clutched at their hearts in alarm.

Behind them, the little old woman had opened her sunken mouth, and her hollow voice could be heard across the entire room, a lethargic, plaintive voice materializing from some distant, crumbling ruin:

—Daughter of my daughter! Whoever talks less about herself talks less foolishness.

How odd that even now this little old woman also wanted to crack jokes. Her daughter’s daughter, the midwife Schatz, was neither surprised nor incredulous. Smiling broadly, she’d merely plumped up the pillows behind the little old woman, and still smiling, had yelled into her ear:

—I remember,
bobenyu
,
*
I remember.

The midwife chattered on without cessation all evening, telling many anecdotes about herself and one of her uncles, an observant, good-natured Jew:

This uncle would regularly call on her and say:

—Really, Malkele? Will you really never get married? A pity … a great pity.

And Mirel sat on a chair opposite her, heard without listening, thinking about herself and the promenade on which she’d wandered about that evening, and lingered on here for an inordinately long time recalling only a hushed, unhappy tale that had been hers from childhood on:

—She’d grown up as an only child in the house of Reb Gedalye Hurvits … Some undefined longing had filled her, so at the age of seventeen she’d betrothed herself to Velvl Burnes … This hadn’t been enough—so she’d taken herself o. to the provincial capital to pursue her studies like everyone else … But this hadn’t helped either, so she’d returned home and, as she imagined, had fallen in love with Nosn Heler here in the shtetl … But this too had proved insufficient, and she continued to believe that her future life ought to be entirely different. Once she’d told Nosn openly: “Nothing would come of this; he might as well leave the shtetl.” She’d broken off her engagement and returned the betrothal contract … Now she was free once more, and was again filled with vague, undefined longings … so she wandered aimlessly about the shtetl for days on end, with Lipkis limping after her … And at present she was sitting with the midwife Schatz who for almost two years past had been living in her rented cottage at the farthest end of the peasant village.

No exceptional misfortune, it seemed, had marked either her life or the life of the midwife Schatz, but then no exceptional happiness had distinguished their lives either, which was why she reflected with such sadness about herself, and about the undefined formative years that the midwife had left behind together with her anonymous family somewhere in Lithuania, and something in her wanted to say:

—Do you know what, Schatz? You’re a strange person. Are you aware of this, Schatz? In the end you’ll be laid in your grave, still with an ironic smile on your lips.

But now the midwife Schatz had rolled herself another cigarette at her box of tissue papers. Lighting it from the lamp, she cast a sidelong glance at the infuriated Lipkis, and smiled with the air of a prankster wanting to make peace:

—Everyone’s odd, in one way or another.

It seemed as though she were preparing to talk about someone or other whose whole life was odd. Quite possibly she’d now talk about her acquaintance, the sturdy and solitary young Hebrew writer Herz, who took himself off every summer to a quiet Swiss village and every winter went back to the little Lithuanian shtetl where a granite tombstone had long since been erected at community expense over the grave of his deceased grandfather, the rabbi.

Yet there was good reason to suspect that the midwife had been thwarted in love, particularly for this young man, who now believed in nothing; that something unpleasant had occurred between them two years before as a result of which the midwife had unwillingly been forced to leave her shtetl and move to this bleak end of the village.

Mirel drew her chair closer to the bed on which the midwife had comfortably settled herself, while Lipkis’s mind was still preoccupied with his ongoing everyday problems:

—Every day his mother nagged him to have a half-dozen sets of fresh underwear made … Given all his expenses, in the end he wouldn’t have enough to get to the city next winter.

By the time this thought had ceased to bedevil him, Mirel, her eyes alive with interest, was leaning intently toward the midwife and listening with great absorption to every word that came slowly from her mouth in a cloud of cigarette smoke.

—So Mirel wanted to know whether Herz corresponded with her? Firstly, he was far too clever for that sort of thing and disliked doing foolish things, and secondly …

Drawing so deeply on her cigarette that its glowing tip illuminated her face, she exhaled the smoke from her mouth, adding with a grimace of aggrieved incredulity:

—One might think that she really missed not receiving letters from him …

Lipkis pulled a mocking face:

—Quite true: evidently the midwife never missed what she’d never had and would never have.

This was seemingly the way in which he wanted to pay her back for her earlier remark: “Too bad for you, Lipkis! Too bad for you!” but he restrained himself, glanced at her agitated features with hostility, and held his peace.

This single illuminated room in the midwife’s cottage was remarkably quiet. Since it was evidently very late, the silence itself seemed audible. Through the calm of deep night that lingered in all the dimly lit corners, the only thing that could be heard was the way Lipkis leaned his head against the bedstead, and the dying fall of the carefully considered words about her acquaintance that the midwife Schatz tossed into the stillness:

—Two years ago he’d poked fun at himself and told her: To write during the day was a disgrace to him personally as well as to the entire Jewish population of the shtetl who had no need of it, so he wrote only at night, when people were asleep. At night, he said, everyone’s sense of shame was diminished. And then he’d smiled and held his peace. Nothing else was left to him, he said, except this smiling silence.

The wandering shadow of this homeless young man seemed to hover in the very air of the room, creating the strong impression that somewhere in a nearby corner behind them he himself was standing at his full sturdy, somewhat stooped height. With blond, freshly barbered hair and equally fair, close-cut mustache and sideburns, he was placidly glancing in this direction with smiling eyes, listening to what the midwife Schatz was saying about him:

This winter, too, this rootless wanderer was doubtless drifting about in that tiny, desolate Lithuanian shtetl, passing his days rambling for great distances over the snow-covered fields.

Mirel broodingly called to mind her own situation every time the midwife related that he never spoke with any intellectuals over there, and even kept his distance from ordinary townsfolk. But if somewhere far, far away from the shtetl he encountered a peasant striding along somewhere, he’d stop and engage in a lengthy conversation with him.

—From what village did he come? Did he have a wife and children? And whose was the land he tilled: his own or a stranger’s?

Then Mirel looked at the midwife again, listening as she disclosed more of the same: