The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (16 page)

He was making an excellent marriage, Velvl: he was marrying a beautiful young woman, it was said, a brunette who’d completed her studies at a
gymnasium
*
in the provincial capital and who’d remarked of him to someone else not long before:

—All in all, he’s a thoroughly decent young man, that Velvl Burnes; he certainly stood higher in her estimation than all those of her acquaintances who’d graduated from high schools, and she certainly found no fault whatever in him that his first fiancée had rejected him.

Mirel rarely appeared in public at that time, and no one knew what she was thinking. Only once did she comment on these rumors to the midwife Schatz:

—Quite possibly this young woman who’s completed her studies at the
gymnasium
is no fool …

Regardless of the fact that the midwife was extremely displeased with this conversation and interrupted her, she went on:

—Be that as it may … she found it insulting and painful, and didn’t want Velvl to get married.

Some time after that, a bleak, depressing Thursday thick with frost descended on the shtetl, and here and there, on the houses of the very poor, the weekly burden of earning a living lay very heavy:

—Prepare for the Sabbath, eh? Is it really time to prepare for the Sabbath again?

Jews without gainful employment stood around the shops in the marketplace chatting about the lavish soirée being held that evening at Tarabay’s house in the village:

—Why not? Is there anything Tarabay can’t afford?

And farther over, at that end of town which bordered on the peasant cottages, Mirel, warmly dressed and unhappy, was seated in Reb Gedalye’s rickety sleigh drawn by his emaciated horses on her way to this party at Tarabay’s home, and in her depression she bade the Gentile lad who was driving her make a detour to the midwife Schatz’s remote cottage.

She was thrown into still greater despondency by the lock she found on the midwife’s door, stood there crestfallen for a while, and finally left in the care of her peasant neighbor the invitation Tarabay had sent the midwife, adding a few words of her own:

—She was to come there immediately, not for the sake of Tarabay who recommended her professional services to all the neighboring landowners, but for her sake, for Mirel.

She paused there a little longer, reconsidering whether or not to go:

—This was really a foolish journey to an equally foolish evening at Tarabay’s. She’d certainly do better to turn back and go home.

Afterward she was intensely downcast and depressed for the entire twenty-four versts of the trip, gazed at the vacant fields all around over which the cold, heavily overcast skies lowered with late winter desolation, and felt even more disheartened and diminished from the fact that far, far behind her, moving swiftly along the road to Tarabay’s home, were the two expensive sleighs of those who were once to have been her in-laws, filling the silence of the fields with the jingle of their bells. She thought:

—The midwife Schatz … If only the midwife Schatz would come as well.

Half an hour later, these two fast-moving sleighs had caught up and drawn level to the left and right of her. Their silence was peculiarly disdainful, these people in these elaborately decorated sleighs moving so rapidly to the left and right of her. She glanced at them as though through a dream and noticed:

With a strained and distant expression on his face, her former fiancé sat in one of these elaborately decorated conveyances, and from the other his warmly clad sisters shouted out across her:

—Velvl! Did you bring it with you?

They shouted calmly and busily across her, as though across an inanimate object, received a mere shake of his head in reply, and swiftly left her behind.

Only when these two sleighs had sped swiftly into the distance and begun to grow smaller against the horizon did she rouse herself from her half-dozing state and notice:

The little Gentile lad who was driving her had been standing up the whole time, ceaselessly whipping the emaciated horses which were striving forward with their last strength, and was apparently trying to overtake those long-vanished other sleighs. She instantly leapt up from her seat and grabbed his shoulders:

—What a wretched madman he was! How long had he been whipping these worn-out beasts?

Ashamed of himself, the little Gentile pulled the exhausted animals to a halt, crept down from the sleigh in great embarrassment, and worked next to one of them for perhaps a full half hour, tying together a halter that had snapped.

Humbly and dejectedly she sat in the sleigh moralizing at him:

—She, Mirel, would be perfectly content if both these pitiful horses were to die on the same night, but as long as they were still struggling for life in this world, one ought to fear God and not whip them.

She arrived in the village just as night had fallen, when lamps had already been lit in all the wealthy Gentile houses, and when the harsh indifference of the glance that these illuminated houses cast on her unfamiliar sleigh intensified from moment to moment:

—The local Gentiles here were peaceable and rich—these houses wished to make clear.—Apart from their land, the local Gentiles here also had a prosperous sugar refinery close by which provided for them abundantly all winter.

By now the gloom of dusk lay on the village’s long paved road that, in company with an entire plateau of rustic roofs, rose higher and higher up the gradual incline of the hill and ended where the sky’s rim was a wash of intense red up into which the refinery’s giant chimney poked like a festive exclamation point. Extraordinarily slowly, the weary horses dragged their way up this residentially developed hill, their heads continually bowed to the ground. And the surrounding houses with their alien appearance awakened a very particular kind of disquiet, the mournful Friday evening disquiet of an observant Jew who’d been delayed in returning home in time to welcome the Sabbath, who in the sanctified twilight was still lugging himself and his wagon through the deep mud on the country roads, hauling himself onward slowly and calling to mind:

There in the brightly lit synagogue in his shtetl, observant Jews were already swaying in prayer, swaying together in unison as they full-throatedly followed the cantor’s lead:

—Give thanks unto the Lord for He is good, for His mercy endureth forever …

With brightly illuminated, new-fangled windows, Nokhem Tarabay’s big house occupied the full breadth of the farthest alley in the village, wordlessly communicating its master’s patently obvious rhetorical question:

—I don’t understand: if God is good and one earns well and enjoys good health, why shouldn’t one live in worldly comfort and ease? Why should one live worse than the Gentile landowners?

The semicircular courtyard in which her weary conveyance stopped, the open verandah, the high, white-painted front door with its nickel name-plate, all were spotless and neat.

When she finally rang the bell at this front door, the short, perpetually cheerful Nokhem Tarabay, bareheaded and wearing a little black frock coat, immediately ran out to receive her, bowing with his little feet pressed elegantly together.

—
Jaśniewielmożna Panna
Hurvits has delayed her arrival by fully two hours.

Continually tugging his shirt cuffs from under his coat sleeves, he went on chattering to her in the brightly lit entrance hall while a smartly dressed maid helped her off with her outdoor things:

—The invitation explicitly stated that all guests were to arrive at four o’clock, and now she’d see for herself: his pocket watch was always accurate, and at present it showed exactly six, which even for Mirel wasn’t very polite. But she might be certain: he’d always been a good friend to her and to Reb Gedalye, and he wouldn’t be so much as a single minute late for her wedding.

In the entrance hall, which overflowed with coats of all kinds, she adjusted her hair in front of the huge mirror, glanced at her face and her décolletage, and forced herself to smile at Tarabay who was standing behind her:

—He might certainly believe her: it wasn’t her fault …

But even in the first brightly lit room into which, having taken her arm, Tarabay led her, she was suddenly aware of the alluring power of her graceful figure in its close-fitting cream wool gown. Her gratified heart abruptly swelled with intoxicating pride.

—She’d actually done well to arrive only now … uncommonly well …

She seated herself in one of the low chairs of a suite in a corner of the room opposite Tarabay’s shrewd, truculent wife, felt many of the guests’ glances turn to her, and smilingly answered all their questions:

—Yes … Her mother was a stay-at-home; she’d always been a stay-at-home.

From time to time she stole a glance into the crowded depths of the room and saw:

Heads bent together, glanced sideways at her, and whispered to each other as they did so:

—Who? … Mirel Hurvits? … From which shtetl?

Among two such bent heads, seated on a sofa next to the locked French doors, were her former fiancé’s two sisters, whose noses were already pinched in superior disapproval, as though someone were preparing at any moment to approach and remind them:

—Only ten years before, their father had been a pauper.

Despite being completely drunk, one of the guests, a heavy-set Pole with a boorish, unshaven face, remembered openly to flatter Tarabay, through whose good offices he’d not long before obtained employment at the sugar refinery. Barely able to stand on his feet, he stopped every guest, whether known or unknown to him, endlessly to repeat the single witticism Tarabay had uttered, almost shaking himself to bits with mirth and drunken enthusiasm as he did so:

—
A to szelma, ten Pan Tarabay … szelma …
*

One of those guests from the sugar refinery who’d buried themselves in whist by the light of the candles on the little baize table, suddenly rose rapidly from his chair with the cards in his hand and just as rapidly shouted out to all the young people who’d crowded together in the adjoining room:

—Champagne later! … Champagne at exactly midnight!

And next to Mirel, as though next to the daughter of an old and valued friend, Nechama Tarabay went on sitting, scrutinizing her with her disingenuous black eyes before which even the smooth-tongued Tarabay quailed, and trying hard to engage her in worldly conversation:

—Recently she’d tried to reason with Gitele, her mother: since you take the train so rarely to the provincial capital, why don’t you travel second class? … For Heaven’s sake, how much more expensive is second class? Sixty kopecks, perhaps?

And more:

—Why on earth should one go on living in utter boredom there in that desolate shtetl? Here in this village … here, there’s a sugar refinery … there are people here, one can have a social life … there are at least business opportunities here …

All the while, at the crowded table in the center of the overcrowded room, her former fiancé sat with his back to her, not knowing what to do with his hands. Every time she deliberately raised her demanding, high-pitched voice from where she was seated, he fiddled gratuitously with the back of his collar and stared too intently into the face of a tall young merchant who kept jumping up from his chair and arguing with great intensity:

—Quiet! Hadn’t he begged Reb Nokhem a year ago to sow as many sugar beets as possible?

Standing a little farther on, at the very end of the room, all in deeply cut white evening waistcoats, were a few young men from the sugar refinery who knew everything that had passed between Mirel and Nosn Heler the previous summer and as a result stared at her décolletage and smiling face with drunken, lecherous eyes and whispered prurient remarks about her:

—How’s that for a pretty piece of female, eh?

Someone called Nechama Tarabay away for a confidential chat, and Mirel was left alone here on the suite’s low chair while the young men from the sugar refinery continued to stare at her. Casting an oddly distracted glance at her own slender figure, she rose and wandered off to a side room where she found, wearing a short, housewifely apron with hands clasped and one foot in front of her, Tarabay’s daughter Tanya, no longer as young as she’d have liked to be, with her head tilted a little to one side, hoping in this way to suggest, by looking at no one and quietly clucking her tongue:

—She’d not expected this whole get-together, and she’d no intention of taking any part in it.

When someone in this room addressed Mirel by name, her heart pounded, but this was only a simple, religiously observant young wife from their shtetl, who wore a headkerchief, still lived in the home and at the expense of her father, the ritual slaughterer, and was related to Tarabay through her husband:

—What had she wanted to ask? She believed Mirel had come here in her own sleigh, and she, this young wife, now felt quite unwell here. Perhaps she might soon be able to ride home with Mirel?

Meanwhile, a tall young man was now standing beside Tanya Tarabay, trying to convince her that living in big cities had great advantages and listening courteously as she maintained her own contrary opinion:

—At the end of last summer she’d been in Odessa to write the qualifying matriculation examinations … She’d felt so unwell there … She could hardly wait to escape from the place.

Suddenly the young folk from the adjoining room rushed in all together in hot pursuit of Tarabay’s younger son, the student at the science-oriented school, seized him, and boisterously dragged him back to where they’d come from:

—Why didn’t he want to recite? What harm would it do him to recite something?

Someone totally unknown to her approached Mirel and began complaining about the science student:

—Only a few weeks before he’d recited magnificently—at a soirée in the metropolis he’d declaimed splendidly.

But by now Mirel was extremely put out by the fact that her former fiancé’s newly arrived parents had settled themselves in the salon. She stood on her own with her back pressed against the wall, raised her melancholy face a little higher and saw: