The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (29 page)

—Shmulik! … Open your eyes … The distillery’s on fire, Shmulik!

Mirel couldn’t abide them, these smiling young relatives, and never addressed a single word to them. Passing the open study door she avoided so much as glancing inside. But now, with his eyes open, Shmulik lay on the sofa in there. He stretched the whole of his sleepy body and smiled at her gently and good-naturedly:

—Mirele, will you come across to Father’s, Mirele?

Without looking round at him, she immediately strode into the dining room. A few Sabbaths before, in response to the same question, she’d retorted: “He’d find his own way there without her.” He wasn’t too much of a child to remember this answer and to stop pestering her.

Later, after Shmulik and his father had gone off to Sabbath afternoon prayers, from the dining room she suddenly heard the sharp ring of the new doorbell and the rapid entry of someone making equally rapid inquiries about Shmulik:

—Not here? When will he be back? Has he gone to his father for the last meal of the Sabbath?

This was Shmulik’s cousin, Big Montchik.
*
In honor of the Sabbath he was wearing a brand-new gray suit and brand-new patent-leather shoes to match. All in all, with the distracted expression of a busy merchant and the energetic frame of a big-city wheeler-dealer, he was in haste to return to the center of the bustling metropolis from which he’d only just come down, as though waiting for him there was not some dishonestly acquired little profit but some entirely new and important debauchery. Indeed, his huge black preoccupied eyes now gleamed even more than usual. Yet for quite some time he sat bareheaded next to Mirel, behaved toward her as though with a newly acquired relative with whom he wished to be on comfortably familiar terms, and told lengthy stories about himself and Shmulik, about the Lithuanian
melamed
^†
with whom they’d studied in Uncle Yankev-Yosl’s house when they were children, and about the doves they used to breed in those days, in the very wing in which Mirel and Shmulik now lived.

Once they had as many as ten pairs of doves at one time, so they took a male from one pair and a female from another, locked them up in the small room that was now Shmulik’s study, and had waited to see what would come of it. Could Mirel believe that? Such scamps as they were! And he, Montchik, wasn’t yet ten years old at the time.

To be sure, the notion of locking up an unpaired male and female in the same room had been his, Montchik’s—he’d proposed it, and Shmulik had carried it out. Clearly this was the reason he exuded the air of one well versed in the sins of the big city. And many such sins, it would seem, still lay before him, which explained why he was so powerful, so energetic, and so preoccupied.

Mirel barely heard what he was telling her. Lying on the sofa, she stared at him with enormous eyes and thought that in all her life she’d never before encountered a character like this. Once, during the first days of her arrival, he’d bumped into her in the very middle of the city’s noisiest street and had accompanied her for several blocks. That was when she’d seen for herself that he had a great many acquaintances, both Christian and Jewish, that he was on familiar terms with virtually all of them, and that he shouted after some of them:

—Come and see me this evening; I need you.

—Be sure to be at home at eleven o’clock, d’you hear? At exactly eleven o’clock.

In her mother-in-law’s house they thought the world of this preoccupied young man. Every time he snatched a moment to come down from town to visit them, they surrounded him and peppered him with questions:

—Montchik, why didn’t you come last Sabbath?

—Montchik, Auntie Pearl’s sent you a gift from Warsaw—have you seen it?

—Montchik, will you come to the distillery with us on Sunday?

For some reason, all the Zaydenovskis were excessively fond of him, and since none of them ever remembered that they’d often described him in the same terms to every new member of the family, they’d all start simultaneously repeating that he was very clever, very shrewd, and had been possessed of remarkable intelligence from childhood on, and that he knew a great deal, a very great deal, even though at the age of eighteen he’d abandoned his studies at the commercial school and with his clever head had manipulated his way into some kind of prosperous merchant partnership of which he was still to this day the principal. In the metropolis he had by now acquired a reputation, considerable credit, and a wide acquaintance, and people often sought business advice from him. When he’d run out of things to say here, and, holding his hat in his hand, was ready to take his leave, he suddenly remembered one of these seekers after advice, and delayed his departure a while longer:

—This very week a young man who’d come to seek his advice mentioned that he was an acquaintance of Mirel’s; he was good-looking, this young man, very good-looking indeed; he looked like a Romanian. Wait, what was his surname? … Hel … Hel … Heler, yes, Heler. He wanted to publish a penny newspaper in Russian here, but all told he had a capital of only three thousand rubles. Well! … It wouldn’t work; it wasn’t a viable business proposition.

Mirel’s heart immediately started pounding and almost died within her.

Montchik might’ve mentioned this encounter in passing, simply by chance. But then again, he might’ve had some intention in doing so … He might’ve been sent by her mother-in-law.

For quite some time after Montchik had left, she lay where she was, so calm and detached that she surprised even herself. But quite suddenly she began to resent the fact that Heler moved in the same circles as her husband’s relatives and spoke of her, Mirel. She no longer wanted to think about him and, seemingly in anger, rapidly began dressing in order to go that quiet lane on which he was waiting for her:

—No … This had to come to an immediate end; she was disgusted by the whole sorry tale. He’d have to stop building hopes about her, Mirel.

As always Nosn Heler was waiting for her next to the closed post office located on the quiet lane, tensely overwrought and afraid that she wouldn’t come. Every now and then he screwed up his eyes and gazed intently toward the farthest end of the street on which the distant low-hanging sun still blazed down, inflaming the yellowing leaves on the surrounding trees and the roofs on the nearby houses. From time to time some gilded person emblazoned with red-gold sunshine approached from that direction—but it wasn’t Mirel. When he did finally catch sight of her coming toward him, he failed to recognize her and didn’t believe that it could really be she. He remembered that he ought to tell her something about himself, about the unendurable days he’d lived through, about the fact that he could no longer go on in this way. He was strongly attracted to her slender figure and to her face; he wanted to weep.

But coming up to her, he noticed that her expression was sad, severe, and estranged, and he instantly forgot what he wanted to tell her. For a while they stood opposite each other without speaking. While his head was bowed, Mirel glanced at him but said nothing. He heard her draw a long, quiet breath and slowly start walking. He, too, gave a sigh of sorts and followed her. Clearly, she’d come to him for the last time. His whole body trembled. Had he attempted to speak, his teeth might have chattered in his mouth. He looked not at her but opposite, at the closed post office. Its roof still glowed in the last of the sunshine; a missing pane from one of its windows had been patched from within by a sheet of blue paper. Only now did he look at Mirel again, noticing that in the last few days she’d grown very haggard and that there were dark shadows under her eyes; she’d almost certainly locked herself away indoors all that time, and had been tormented by thoughts wholly unrelated to him, Heler. Since this pained him, he said:

—What else could be expected? He was nothing to her, after all …

Mirel made no reply.

They turned left and walked downhill following the wide, crooked street with the cobblestones, which were bigger here than elsewhere to control the rush of water during the rainy season. Presently they reached the end of this winding road, which marked also the city’s farthest extremity, and at this terminal point they sat down on a bench opposite the many windows of an elongated, one-storied foundry. The red fire of the distant setting sun was reflected in its electrically illuminated windowpanes, and, to the right, the high green hills and the clay pits that prevented any further extension of the city steeped themselves in it. There on a knoll near a deserted windmill a tethered horse grazed on the reddened grass, and a Gentile boy in white canvas trousers stood on its crest gazing down at the city. All at once Nosn, sensing that he was growing more agitated from moment to moment, began speaking well before his mind knew what words it wanted his mouth to utter:

—He knew … One thing he knew for certain. He actually wanted to ask her …

Mirel stared at him in astonishment, not knowing what he wanted.

He was still unable to gather the thread of his thoughts. Fancying that Mirel was looking at him as though he were a babbling idiot, he grew even more agitated; he was overcome with a powerful resentment against her that helped him to pull himself together and quite unexpectedly to say what he wanted without fully anticipating it himself.

—This was what he wanted to know: did Mirel love him? She couldn’t deny it. So he asked only one thing of her: why didn’t she want to divorce her husband and marry him, Heler?

Mirel heard him out, shrugged her shoulders, and glanced down at the lines she’d scratched out on the ground with the tip of her parasol:

—Well, and afterward, after the wedding … ?

—Afterward?

Heler did not understand what she meant by this.

—Afterward they’d go abroad … afterward …

Mirel again shrugged her shoulders and rose from the bench.

Heler wanted to make some other affrmation, but she anticipated what he was going to say. She found it distasteful to listen and stopped him coldly:

—She disliked talking too much.

But Heler was now beside himself:

—How on earth had she managed to live for four whole months with her foolish husband? He was ridiculed in town … People openly laughed in his face …

He stopped talking only because Mirel turned to face him with an expression of even greater alienation from him; he regarded it sadly and a shudder seemed to pass though him.

She responded:

—She’d asked him several times not to speak of her husband and to leave him in peace … Her husband was a good man … At least he harmed no one.

She was annoyed at herself. It seemed to her that a great many young wives had spoken the selfsame words about their foolish husbands to the young men with whom they wandered the quiet streets.

—All events he, Heler, wasn’t someone for whom it was worth changing her opinion of her husband.

She had no wish to think about these words, the last she’d spoken in anger before parting from him. Without looking back, she tried hard to put him out of her mind. Walking on at a brisk, regular pace, she wore her customary sorrowful expression as she tried to shake off her agitation and clarify her thoughts:

—Now she’d broken with him, with Heler. And now … Wait … She had to break with someone else, it seemed to her … Yes. With them, with the Zaydenovskis. She had to bring all that to an end very quickly.

Now she had to get home and put this task in hand.

Late in the evening, after several more hours of aimless wandering, she returned to her little house on the outskirts of the suburb. From its unlighted windows a wave of desolation suddenly swept over her, and she no longer had any desire to ring for the sleeping maid and pass through its darkened rooms. Across the way, festively illuminated this Sabbath evening, the windows of her father-in-law’s big house looked out over the shadowy orchard. She was overcome by an urge to call in, to observe things again in order to convince herself once more of the truth of what she was thinking:

—She derived absolutely no benefit from not yet having left Zaydenovski’s house.

In the end she did go in, and sat for long time desperately bored in the dining room without taking off the jacket she’d worn in the street and without speaking a word to anyone.

As always, virtually the entire extended family had gathered here on this Sabbath evening. They sat on chairs both old and new ranged round the long, spread table and next to the big sideboard, stood in groups beside the glass-fronted heritage chest fitted high up on the wall, or lolled about on the huge, wide sofa over which the room’s sole embroidered picture hung low.

Young and old alike, all these relatives loved Shmulik, regarded him as exceptionally good and tenderhearted, and played games with him as though he were a clever child. All of them knew that Mirel was beautiful and refined, yet none was completely satisfied with her and kept her at a distance, repeatedly remarking among themselves that she wasn’t the one for whom both they and Shmulik had waited these last few years, and continually recalling a very rich local girl, Ita Moreynes, who to this day continued to pine for Shmulik.

—It’s remarkable that only the other day old Moreynes himself specifically said that he’d intended to settle twenty thousand rubles on Shmulik.

Among the relatives that evening was the somewhat disaffected former university student Miriam, tall, handsome, and big-boned, who had a past as a canny, confirmed revolutionary. As recently as eighteen months earlier she’d married a party comrade, the engineer Lyubashits, had a child with him, and immediately after her first lying-in had started putting on weight, smiling excessively, and once more calling regularly at Uncle Yankev-Yoysef’s house. Like all the others, she too said that she’d never been indifferent to Shmulik, smiled at him far too warmly, and kept on remarking on one of his good-natured idiosyncrasies:

—Three weeks before she’d bumped into Shmulik at the main railway station and had introduced him there to his relative, Naum Kluger. Naum was traveling from Kharkov, where only this year he’d just qualified as a doctor …