The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (42 page)

—The devil only knew what kind of filth they used to heat their
tsholnt
over there.

Suddenly the tinkling of bridle bells on an out-of-town hackney carriage could be heard, and a driver fresh from the railway station sped through the shtetl terrifying a cock and several hens, turned, and came to a halt before the steps of Avreml the rabbi’s house.

This was very strange:

Alone in the carriage sat Mirel Hurvits, her head with its straw hat swathed in white tulle, nodding and smiling affably at the rabbi’s wife who’d just appeared in the doorway.

For appearances’ sake, Libke the rabbi’s wife received her with flattering courtesy:

—What a question … She’d take her daughter Hanke into her own bedroom, and Mirel could have Hanke’s room to herself.

And hand in hand, she and Mirel went into the house, with Mirel taking everything she said at face value:

—Yes, she’d known before she asked that she’d be able to live here for a few weeks—in any case, not more than a few weeks.

Returning from their walk that Sabbath afternoon, some smartly dressed young women made a detour and deliberately strolled down the side alley that ran past the windows of Avreml the rabbi’s house.

The alley was clean and quiet. Houses there threw their Sabbath shadows before them in friendly rivalry:

—My shadow’s bigger.

—And mine bigger still.

Through the open door floated the comically enthusiastic chant with which Avreml the rabbi was reading those passages from the Talmud he was studying. In her red ritual wig, Libke the rabbi’s wife sat on the front steps yawning, her face puffy with sleep, and without looking around called out to her eleven-year-old daughter who was inside the house:

—Hanke, bring the fruit out here, Hanke!
*
There’s a plate in the dresser, Hanke!

And at her side, leaning her head against her hand, sat Mirel, staring bleakly out into the alleyway.

—Yes—she said—she greatly regretted the fact that even their relative and former bookkeeper had also moved from the shtetl to the provincial capital.

The shtetl soon knew that some sort of scandalous scene had taken place between her and her husband in the corridor of the hotel, with the result that she’d been forced to flee from the metropolis.

By this time Nosn Heler, the young man with whom she’d once spent her time wandering all over the shtetl, had squandered his entire inheritance on his penny newspaper. He now worked somewhere in the vicinity for sixty rubles a month and was again speaking all manner of ill about her. On one occasion he’d buttonholed the photographer Royzenboym there and shown him a very distasteful note that Mirel had sent him by city messenger the previous winter. And the photographer Royzenboym, a lean, powerfully built young man with the sunburned face and wide embroidered shirt of a Gentile, had subsequently returned home to the shtetl here and had tickled the infuriated Safyan under both armpits every evening:

—Turns out no one can know whose child Mirel was carrying, Safyantshik! …

Once, wholly without warning, Montchik suddenly came down from the provincial capital to visit her, but stayed no longer than the interval between one train and the next.

In the shtetl it was soon common knowledge that although Montchik himself was by no means indifferent to Mirel, he’d come down not on his own behalf but on that of her husband, his cousin, who was begging her to return to him; that Montchik was a rich young bachelor and that in general, so people said:

—He was a person of refinement, this Montchik.

While he was in private discussion with Mirel in one of the rooms, Libke the rabbi’s wife stood eavesdropping behind the door and heard Mirel give him a categorical answer:

—That’ll never happen … Do you hear, Montchik? … Never!

Afterward they both sat in the dining room. Preoccupied, Montchik stared in front of him with huge round eyes, every now and then making a dismissive gesture:

—He’d say no more … He wouldn’t speak another word about this again.

A spark of deeply wistful sorrow flared in Mirel’s eyes; her face was flushed and she bit her lower lip. All at once she recalled that Montchik had spent eighteen hours traveling on the train, refused to believe that he wasn’t hungry, and, smiling, began frying eggs for him here at the table.

At the same time Libke the rabbi’s wife set out to demonstrate that she too was quite capable of entertaining worldly people. She sat politely at the table and affectedly addressed Montchik in the diction used in Warsaw:
*

—Did he have any desire at all to inspect their shtetl?

Glancing at Mirel, Montchik rose distractedly from his chair:

—Yes, certainly … This would be the first time in his life that he’d seen a Jewish shtetl.

In the shtetl, people stood in their doorways watching him and Mirel walk down the street: he in a new light-colored suit and the gleaming white collar and cuffs of a big-city sophisticate, and she in a simple white, elegantly tailored dress with her head uncovered. From a distance she pointed out to him where Avrom-Moyshe Burnes lived, led him to her father’s deserted house, and showed him:

—This was my room.

They paused on the verandah and peered inside through the broken window panes. Mirel raised both her hands to her head to prevent a little comb slipping from her hair, but it fell to the ground nevertheless, and when Montchik restored it to her, she very slowly took it from his hand. For a while they stood smiling at each other.

Darkness was falling, yet she continued to lead him along the side streets. It grew chilly. Montchik remarked:

—It’s strangely cheerless … so utterly and completely cheerless. And yet … Who could know? Perhaps the experience of this moment alone was sufficient to justify the twenty-six years that he, Montchik, had lived in the world.

Looking at him, Mirel stretched out the cold fingers of her left hand for him to press.

With the total darkness of night had come the coolness of a summer evening. Fresh, round, and pale, a new moon rose over the alley at the back of the rabbi’s house where more young women than usual were taking the air, and the coachman from the railway station had already drawn up outside the rabbi’s open front door, the same coachman who’d brought Montchik into town only a few hours earlier. Inside the house, the rabbi’s wife had set a lighted lamp on a windowsill and thus made the little street seem even more festive.

Mirel hastily packed Montchik’s satchel.

—Montchik, look here … Isn’t this your towel?

Montchik was preoccupied and barely heard what was said to him. When two boys from the Talmud Torah approached him for a tip, he took five gold coins from his pocket, looking questioningly at Mirel as he did so, under the impression that this was perhaps too little.

Mirel escorted him out of the house quickly, afraid that he might miss his train.

—He oughtn’t to have come down here—she said.—He’d caused her such strange pain, Montchik had; he’d wrung her heart so sharply. Were he to stay just a little while longer, she might very well do something foolish and not allow him to leave.

She took both his hands and led him to the cab, then stood there with Libke the rabbi’s wife watching the coachman suddenly whip up the horses, turn so abruptly as almost to topple the vehicle, and gallop swiftly off down the road to the railway station.

—He’ll easily be home by tomorrow—she said.—He has so many business affairs there … It’s better that way.

For a short while longer she looked in the direction in which the cab had disappeared, evidently thinking that this was for the best.

Three days after Montchik’s departure, two telegrams suddenly arrived for her from the city suburb. Even while they were still sealed, they told her that Montchik was in his own home again, spent much time there thinking about the day he’d spent with her here, and was once again conducting his business at the banks and on the stock exchange; that Shmulik had already called on him at home and heard the categorical answer she’d sent him through Montchik. Libke the rabbi’s wife was desperate to know what was written in the telegrams, but Mirel had merely glanced at their office of origin and returned them, unopened, to the postman:

—The only answer need be—she told him—that she’d refused to accept these telegrams, that was all; she refused to accept them.

She stayed on in the shtetl as a boarder in the house of Libke the rabbi’s wife, and was noticed every day when she went to the post office to send a great many telegrams and letters to someone who seemed to have no fixed abode. She’d also acquired an unsavory reputation thanks largely to Nosn Heler, who didn’t stop speaking ill about her across the entire district. Safyan, the pharmacist’s assistant, saw her passing as he was standing alone in the pharmacy, earnestly affixing labels to the prescriptions; later he spoke about her to a customer, one of the local intellectuals:

—Would he be so good as to look at her … She was an example to all idlers. And generally speaking, could anyone tell him for what purpose such a person still occupied a place on the earth?

And ordinary people standing about bareheaded inside the pharmacy listened in silence: for a while they forgot about their children lying ravaged with illness at home in their respect for Safyan, who exuded an odor of medicaments, examined the prescriptions with great earnestness before he let them out of his hands, and couldn’t abide idlers.

Mirel received no answer in response to her telegrams and letters.

She wandered aimlessly about the shtetl, growing sadder and more despondent by the day.

People here openly distanced themselves from her. There was no longer any honor in knowing her, and she knew this and never spoke of it. One evening, however, when she’d wandered along the main street feeling deeply unhappy for longer than usual, she stopped both of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s two daughters, inquired after every member of their family, and fell into conversation with them about Velvl, who because of her had given up coming to his parents’ home from his farm.

—Frankly, it was diffcult to understand why Velvl was hiding from her. After all, she knew perfectly well that he was the truest of good friends to her, and she was even aware that he’d traveled out to the railway station on purpose to bid her farewell.

The second time she met Burnes’s daughters she greeted them amiably and inquired:

—Did they perhaps have a mind to hire a carriage the next day and take a drive of some eight or ten versts out of the shtetl?

This happened at about three in the afternoon of a hot Sunday, shortly after Velvl’s mother had left on a trip abroad in search of relief for her asthma, and the farm buggy, in which Velvl had arrived a few hours earlier to see her off, was still stationed next to Burnes’s verandah.

With all its windows wide open, Avrom-Moyshe’s house stood gazing somewhat forlornly at the saplings growing in a straight row before it, and consoled itself:

—Before the windows of every parvenu’s house, apparently, the trees are always young and small.

All the rooms were cool and quiet, the stillness broken only by the gentle rustling of the leaves outside. There was a strong sense that the mistress of the house had only just left for what would be an extended absence; that the household would now be run by the two daughters who’d forget where they’d left the keys and as a result a jollier and more liberated atmosphere than usual would prevail, that the young people’s guests would linger on until late at night, and that if one of the smaller children had a tantrum about something, there’d be no one to rebuke him and he’d have to be bribed with five kopecks to be quiet.

Avrom-Moyshe Burnes paced about in his study exhaling cigarette smoke, his brow as always furrowed above the regretful expression on his unlearned face. Opposite him, next to the desk, holding a map of the three hundred
desyatins
of rich, loamy earth he’d leased not long before, stood Velvl, who was consulting his father about what should be sown there:

—Down here near the marsh perhaps it might be better to sow millet?

Suddenly the elder daughter came in to report that Mirel was now in the house and was sitting in the smaller salon. Overcome by guilt, the young woman felt obliged to justify herself:

—What a situation … How could one be so discourteous? … What was one to do when she started peering in through the open windows from outside and asking whether she might call? …

The young woman soon returned to the salon, leaving behind both father and son in a situation so highly unpleasant that they couldn’t bring themselves to look each other in the face. At any moment, it seemed, Mirel would open the door and set foot in the study. Velvl turned pale and started breathing as rapidly as though he’d only just demonstrated some fairground trick and lifted a mass weighing ten pood. He looked across at his father, waiting to see what he would do, but his father’s expression was so shaded, so wreathed in smoke, and so impassive that not the slightest alteration was evident in it. He simply furrowed his unlearned brow even more deeply and exhaled more cigarette smoke; at length his father slowly and silently made his way out through the back door of the house, seated himself in Velvl’s harnessed buggy, and instructed the coachman to drive him to the brick factory where he had business to attend to.

Velvl followed him out through the same back door and strode off through the side streets to the licensed liquor store
*
where he had to change some money.

Those in the salon, meanwhile, sat around talking about the sounds made by a gramophone, which were very tinny and soon bored the listener to death; about little Ziamke, who knew who Tolstoy was but felt bashful now and wouldn’t say; and about the impoverished gentlewoman who owned land in the village of Pritshepa, an old maid of forty who’d lost her wits again; she’d used the last of her money to buy an automobile and was telling everyone that the local count’s only son would marry her.

Apart from Mirel and Velvl’s sisters, others seated on the velvet chairs were their relative the young external student at the university
^†
who taught the children Hebrew, and the niece of the widow who ran the local inn, a young woman from out of town who was studying dentistry and seemed to be of limited understanding. Standing silently to one side all the while was another young university student, recently brought in as the family tutor from one of the provinces deep in the Russian interior, who’d studied in a yeshiva as a boy. This was the first time he’d seen Mirel in person, but he already knew everything that had happened to her, and not knowing her by sight had often quarreled with both Burnes sisters and with the pharmacist’s assistant, Safyan: