The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (40 page)

—What was he doing in this city?

Nothing in particular: since this was the first time in his life he’d been here, there was some value in admiring the architecture of the apartment buildings and the theater, in strolling down to the chain bridge, stopping near the Gentile lads who were chewing sunflower seeds, and observing, as they did, how the sheet ice on the wide river below had now split into chunks and was waiting in great silence for some message from afar.

On one occasion, however, he crossed the chain bridge and strolled farther into the suburb, smiling again over Mirel’s letter which lay in his pocket.

The festival of Purim was approaching, and the bright day spun its warmth from pure sunshine and clear spring air. The wheels of rapidly passing droshkies clattered more noisily than normal over the newly exposed cobblestones, and toward dusk the sunshine dissolved into a rivulet of molten silver that flowed over both near and distant hills on the outskirts of the city.

—Most important for the coming spring were the bare patches of earth that were steadily being exposed through the melting snow.

On the branches of the trees lining the streets, birds lost themselves in twittering delirium as governesses led their charges home. The air was filled with the scent of light frost, of young women, and of the joy of small-town children who’d soon no longer be obliged to go to school in the dark.

Finding Shmulik’s wing locked and empty, Herz stopped. A passerby directed him to the Zaydenovskis in the big house, so he went across, and in the entrance hall enquired for Mirel.

In the dining room, dough was being kneaded for Purim pastries and honey balls. All the members of the Zaydenovski household, including children and female relatives, were crowded round the long table, irritated by the small freckled lad who kept thrusting his hands into the warm honey-dough until someone shouted at him:

—Feh, you! … What are you licking your fingers for?

The maid was the first to receive Herz in the entrance hall. Not knowing how to answer him herself, she carried his inquiry into the dining room, and almost at once more than a dozen people rushed in, darkening the brightness of the little room as they inquisitively surrounded this unfamiliar young man whose features were ready at any moment to break into a smile.

Looking him over, one young woman was especially anxious to know who he was, so she called out the name of the hotel in which Mirel was staying:

—She was living in two rooms over there.

Someone else knew that all this time Mirel had been waiting there for someone who was supposed to join her here in the city. She made passing reference to Shmulik, who’d been to that hotel a few days earlier and had been wholly unable to gain access to her:

—Mirel was unwell in some way, it seemed … Apparently she’d been confined to her bed for some days now.

Suddenly, blinking her nearsighted eyes, the mother-in-law herself appeared on the threshold of the room:

—Sha! … What were they all standing about here for?

The unknown young man who was asking for Mirel was pointed out to her, so she went right up to him. For a while she peered at him with her eyes screwed up. Then she stretched out her hand to her little boy and very cautiously drew him away from this unfamiliar young man as though she were afraid the child might touch this stranger and so defile himself. She spat to one side the way superstitious folk spit when mentioning someone’s dreadful illness, and forced herself to remark, with the mien of one who wanted absolutely nothing to do with this young man:

—Yes, well … She lives there … in the hotel … that’s where she lives.

*
As this is the month of Elul, the houses too seem figuratively to be observing the period of penitential prayers in preparation for the coming High Holy Days.

†
Known by the Hebrew phrase as
melave-malkah
, “escorting the queen,” this final meal—held after the ritual conclusion of the Sabbath—is prolonged late into the night, especially among Hasidim, so as to extend the beauty and holiness of the Sabbath, metaphorically personified in the Jewish tradition as a queen.

*
The name Montchik is a Russian diminutive of Monia, which is in turn a diminutive of Solomon.

†
A
melamed
was a Hebrew teacher who instructed the smallest children—boys between the ages of three and four—in basic knowledge of the Pentateuch.

*
In the Imperial Russian system of weights and measures, a pood was equivalent to 36.1 pounds, or 16.38 kilograms.

†
The so-called Women’s Bible, known in Yiddish as the
Taytsh-khumesh
, is a rendering in Yiddish of the Pentateuch. It is not a direct translation, but a paraphrase interspersed with passages from the great commentators and interwoven with homilies and legends that aimed to impart ethical instruction to women. Prepared by Rabbi Yitskhok ben Shimshon ha-Kohen (d. 1624), it was first published in Prague in 1608 and was in continual use until the mid-twentieth century.

†
These are all months of the Hebrew calendar, roughly corresponding to the secular months of February, March, and April.

*
All of these are pigments formerly used in oil-based paint.

†
One of the network of smaller units of local self-government through which tsarist Russia controlled each of its fifty provinces.

*
That is, six months after it normally occurs. Nisan is the month of Passover; Elul is the month of the High Holy Days.

*
A Russianized diminutive of the Hebrew name Shoyl, Saul.

*
A droshky is a low four-wheeled, horse-drawn Russian hackney carriage in which passengers sit astride a narrow bench, their feet resting on bars near the ground.

*
Sukkot, known in English as the Feast of Tabernacles, is a seven-day festival that follows five days after Yom Kippur and commemorates God’s benevolence in providing for all the needs of the People of Israel during their forty years of wandering in the desert.

*
The Fast of Gedalye, a minor fast day observed immediately after the second day of Rosh Hashanah, commemorates the assassination of the Babylonian-appointed official charged with administering that remnant of the Jewish population left in Judah following Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the First Temple and the start of the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. Gedalye’s death, recounted in 2 Kings 25:25–26, deprived Judah of all trace of Jewish rule.

*
Orthodox Jewish law forbids a married couple from sleeping in the same bed.

*
During the intermediate weekdays of the Festival of Sukkot the usual restrictions that apply to Jewish holy days are relaxed but not entirely lifted.

*
The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was founded at the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901 to buy and develop land for Jewish settlement in what was then Ottoman Palestine.

*
The novella to which Mirel is referring is
A House of Gentlefolk
(
Dvorianskoe gnezdo
), by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), first published in 1859. Liza, the heroine of this novella, retreats to a convent to escape the pressures of a world she cannot cope with.

*
Every Jewish bill of divorcement must specify the name of the nearest river. Although Kiev, the provincial capital in which the Zaydenovskis live, is situated on the Dnieper River, in order to avoid publicity they decide to move Mirel’s divorce proceedings out of town. The nearest downriver alternative with a strong Jewish presence is Cherkassy, some 120 miles south of Kiev.

*
A lamb’s wool jacket made of the curly fleece of a breed of sheep named from the area around Kara Kul, a lake in central Asia, where it originated. The fleece resembles astrakhan but has a flatter, looser curl; it comes in black, brown or gray.

*
The first telephone installations in Russia, introduced in the 1890s, were made by the American Bell System and were extremely expensive, which meant that only the richest private individuals—and only those living in cities—could afford them.

†
Russian diminutive of the name Zinovii (Zalmen)

*
Liolia is a diminutive of the Russian name Izrail’ (Yisroel).

These events took place during the icy snowstorms between Christmas and the Gentile New Year.

His face red with cold, Velvl Burnes stood in his father’s dining room. He’d only just arrived from his farm and was unable to grasp what was going on around him. Looking concerned, almost all the members of the household were clustered around a charity collector, listening to what he had to tell:

—Reb Gedalye’s end was very near … The doctor from the provincial capital had declared that there was nothing more he could do. Reb Gedalye’s sister had already arrived from abroad … And his daughter … Rumor had it that his daughter was ill herself … In all probability, in her father-in-law’s house over there, the telegrams that were being sent almost hourly from over here were being kept from her.

All was quiet, and through the double-glazed windows the gray winter dusk peered silently in; it spread its fearful desolation into all the darkened corners of the room, and the huge black sideboard, already enveloped in it, stared out in wordless reproach at the melancholy faces of those around it:

—For two years in this very room you cursed Reb Gedalye … And now he’s on his deathbed and the boys from the Talmud Torah are on their way to recite psalms in his name.

Someone called attention to these Talmud Torah boys outside and everyone besieged the window from which they saw:

Across the way, Reb Gedalye’s house was brightly illuminated with lamps that had been lit very early, not to bring happiness but to mark the agony of death in all the rooms. And here, passing along the darkened street before the house, more than forty Talmud Torah boys in tattered sheepskin overcoats trudged knee-high through the deep snowdrifts following two of their teachers who were leading the way toward the Husyatin study house.

The local ritual slaughterer came in, the same pleasant, well-known functionary who’d once been sent as an arbitrator to Reb Gedalye when the engagement contract was returned. He reported:

—He’d just come from there … The will had only just been rewritten to allocate the profit of eighteen thousand rubles which the merchants of the provincial capital had paid for a share in the great Kashperivke woods. The remaining debts amounted to twelve thousand seven hundred, and thirteen hundred had been left to the town’s general charity fund.

Looking sad, with his mind fixed on the affairs he was attending to, the ritual slaughterer seemed in some way sanctified and cut off from the mundane world, as though he’d just immersed himself in a ritual bath prior to undertaking some pious, God-fearing act.

Only Avrom-Moyshe Burnes stood near him, smoking a great many cigarettes, finally calling him into his study to seek his advice:

—What did he think? Perhaps it behooved him, Avrom-Moyshe, to call at Reb Gedalye’s house now?

Velvl followed him to the study and listened in to what was being said. The ritual slaughterer frowned:

—What was there to think about? Of course it would be fitting.

Feeling much lighter in heart, Velvl stole quietly into the dark passage where the full-cut fur coat he used for traveling hung. He donned it stealthily and went quietly outdoors.

Following the side alleys, he made his way surreptitiously to Reb Gedalye’s house, his legs sinking deeply into the newly fallen snow, the hem of his long, wide fur coat dragging behind him and leaving tracks wherever he went. In the aftermath of the snowstorm, silence prevailed everywhere. Everything, from the pallid, noiseless night to the few illuminated houses scattered here and there, appeared oddly expectant and mute, as in the pale obscurity of a dream. From one of these side alleys came the loud slamming of a door and a woman who’d emerged from her house yelled out to her neighbor:

—God could still help Reb Gedalye! … He’d certainly deserved help!

He noticed Reb Gedalye’s relative, his former bookkeeper, who was making haste to return to Reb Gedalye’s house from wherever he’d been. Velvl overtook him:

—A word, if I may … Is there any news? Not good, eh?

The bookkeeper stopped and sighed:

—What news can there be? Assuredly not good.

Reb Gedalye’s relative wasn’t at all surprised to find Velvl lingering in the vicinity here, and he responded as he would to any good friend of Reb Gedalye’s. So Velvl went on to the house. A group of men was standing around one of Reb Gedalye’s former couriers, listening to his description of Gitele, who’d been suffering from a severe headache for the past three days:

—Reb Gedalye’s sister was sitting with her in the darkened bedroom; she wouldn’t permit Gitele to leave her bed.

Avoiding this group, Velvl made his way around the back of the house and stopped outside the illuminated window of Mirel’s room:

—Evidently this was where Reb Gedalye lay.

A little old man, a learned Jew who was now ill, afflicted with a severe cough and failing eyesight, came along the narrow alleyway that led from the Husyatin study house. Groaning, he stopped and, peering narrowly into Velvl’s face with his diseased eyes, wheezingly inquired:

—Who’s this? … Oh … Oh … Velvl?

The little old man complained bitterly about old age, about life, and about death. Velvl waited until he’d disappeared on to Reb Gedalye’s verandah and then moved closer to the window. Now he could see everything that was taking place in the room. Imagination suggested that the air in there was heavy with the stench of medication, of sickness and approaching death, and it seemed as though all within was silent, unnaturally silent. At a little table on which a lamp burned under a blue shade sat the harassed local
feldsher
. Having gone without sleep for several nights, his features were strained as he stared straight ahead at the sickbed on which fell the blue-tinted glow of the shaded lamp. As though walking on eggshells, Avreml the rabbi, looking greatly distressed and agitated, wandered back and forth accompanied by his shadow: his right shoulder jutted upward while from his left the arm hung down oddly, as though paralyzed, almost completely hidden in his sleeve and twitching automatically. And there on the bed against the wall lay the sick man, seemingly lost in abstraction. Because of the leeches that had been applied after the doctor had left, his head had been shaved, making his earlocks and beard appear too big and black and his features too gaunt and shrunken. Every now and then his head moved slowly, very slowly from side to side. The people in the room drew closer to the bed. Standing on tiptoe outside, Velvl saw them doing what Reb Gedalye appeared to be asking of them and sat him up; undressing him, they clothed him afresh in a new, lustrously white shirt in which he looked sanctified and pure, as on the night of Yom Kippur after a fast of twenty-four hours. Slowly, very slowly, they lowered him back on to his pillows and bent closer to hear what he was saying. Someone brought Mirel’s picture into the room and held it up behind Avreml the rabbi, but the rabbi made an angry gesture of dismissal: