The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (44 page)

She still had to remind Herz of something.

But drawing level with the façade of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house, she suddenly regretted this decision and stopped:

—There was nothing more than foolish self-delusion in her longstanding wish to believe that she’d be able to live with him abroad somewhere.

Next to the verandah of Burnes’s house she saw Velvl’s younger sister and turned to her:

—Could Brokhe perhaps tell her what day of the month it was? … She, Mirel, had already stayed far too long here in the shtetl.

Leaving the frightened girl a vivid impression of her fasting, exhausted face with its bruised-looking eyes, she strode rapidly over the dried-out clods of earth toward the post office to send someone a telegram, hearing behind her the stationary buggy suddenly pull away as the cab driver enthusiastically whipped up the horses:

—
Viyo!
… We need to hurry back home in time to read Lamentations!

Libke the rabbi’s wife was waiting for her in the dining room and stopped her:

—Yes … she and Avreml had wanted to speak with her … They’d wanted to tell her that of course she’d been very welcome all the time she’d stayed with them …

Her hands were folded stupidly over her belly and her eyes had an odd gleam. Mirel had no wish to hear what she had to say:

—She knew, she knew … the next day she, Mirel, would no longer be here.

And she went immediately to her room, chained the door behind her, and drew the shutters closed from within.

She urgently needed to sleep, even if only for a few hours, to relieve her splitting headache and calm the anxious turmoil in her mind about what she’d do a few hours later. To think about this was pointless. If the narrow strip of wearisomely blazing sunshine that split the darkness through a crack in the fast-drying shutters made it difficult to doze off, it was still possible, lying on the bed, for her swiftly to pull off her blouse, throw her bare, tingling arms over her burning head and imagine that her twenty-four desolate years of life hadn’t issued solely in a void … This made her feel a little more at ease, and for a moment she ceased fretting about the following day and the fact that she’d have absolutely no place to which she might go. In the swirling confusion that preceded deep sleep, having once had Gedalye Hurvits for a father here in the shtetl seemed so very far away and long ago, and her weary dozing mind summoned up the image of a half-forgotten late Friday afternoon some seven or eight years earlier: the setting sun had cast a rose-red glow over everything, and at a window inside the house stood Gitele, her mother, already dressed for the Sabbath, staring out down the road that led into the shtetl from the provincial capital and complaining anxiously, as she did every Friday:

—Just look: it’s already so late, and there’s still no sign of Gedalye!

She left the house early on the first morning after Tisha B’Av, and did not return to the rabbi’s side street.

In the afternoon she was seen wandering about the deserted promenade next to the post office, and then on the road that led out of the shtetl. Meeting the young man who used to buy two small wagonloads of flour every week from Reb Gedalye’s mill, she asked him to book a cab in the shtetl to take her to the railway station, and to ask at the rabbi’s house that her belongings be sent with it.

When the cab driver drove up to meet her outside the shtetl just before sunset, she was in great haste, but after the first few versts she no longer reproached him for continually slowing down; instead she instructed him not to drive directly to the railway station but to make a slight detour, to the solitary Jewish inn that idled away its days under its red roof at a little distance from the overgrown cottages of the railway workers, waiting day and night for a bridal couple to use it as a rendezvous.

She stayed there more than a week, waiting for someone.

Four times a day people from the shtetl saw her coming to the railway station with her face drawn in sorrow. She wandered along the entire length of each stationary train, peering into every carriage without speaking a word to anyone, and then returned to the inn with her sorrowful expression unchanged. People clustered in a group at the end of the platform and watched her retreating:

—Mirel’s really come down in the world, eh?

At length she left by herself on the train that traveled to the border.

This was reported in town, but knowing where she’d gone was impossible.

Once on a quite ordinary Thursday, when every trace of her had long vanished from the railway station, Velvl Burnes made his way there from his farm after the last trains had departed and drove directly to the inn that stood under its huge red roof.

Smartly clad in a new black suit and brand new linen under his traveling coat, he ordered a room prepared for him and sent his buggy back home:

—His driver was to call for him here tomorrow at noon, did he hear? Not a moment before noon.

All the rooms in the inn were unoccupied, and there were no houses nearby. In his room, where each minute seemed longer and more protracted than in his own home, a silent desolation swept up and over him. He sat on the chintz sofa, wandered over the unfamiliar red floor, stopped at the window and looked out at the geese feeding on the grass beyond.

He went down to the platform twice: in the evening, after both goods trains had left, and very early in the morning when the entire deserted platform was still asleep and the red eye of the distant, white-painted signal boom still gleamed in the rising sun together with the first platform lamp, next to which a ladder had been left the day before.

He also set out along the path that led from the inn to the little wood close by, and stood there on the high bank of a newly restored trench.

Silence reigned in the little wood. High up, the branches barely rustled; from time to time a yellow autumn leaf dislodged itself and drifted down through the air; and the unspeaking trees knew something: they stood all around with their tall clean trunks listening to the barely perceptible rustle of their own branches and thought about Mirel, who’d once lived for more than a week in the nearby inn:

—Yes … Mirel once wandered about over here during the day … She spoke to no one here, but without any need to do so she once wandered slowly about among us, we young tree trunks.

Late in the month, as Elul was approaching, the student Lipkis, no longer crippled, returned home, and while he was still on the road he learned from the cab driver:

—Well, well, well! It’s certainly almost a month since Mirel left us.

In his mother’s house he slept through the whole night as well as all the following morning and all the next afternoon, and had no reason to get up. He snored away comfortably, but his sleepy mind recalled that Mirel was no longer here, that she’d been in his thoughts when they’d anesthetized him for his operation, all the time he’d been convalescing during his summer teaching job, and afterward, when he was already making his way home here and had repeatedly slipped out into the corridor of the train carriage to examine yet again the mended leg he was bringing back for her.

That evening, feeling as deflated as though a wedding he’d been looking forward to had been canceled, he drifted aimlessly about the deserted shtetl with no one in whom to confide that he harbored no resentment against Mirel, that during the summer he would rise with the morning star to resume his medical studies and would repeat over and over together with the contents of his textbooks:

—I’m no enemy to Mirel … no enemy, no enemy.

He stopped next to Reb Gedalye’s abandoned house and regarded it, then strolled slowly down the broad side street and viewed the rabbi’s house from a distance. He found it strangely fresh and novel to saunter slowly and effortlessly through the very same streets along which he’d clumsily swung his hips from side to side for fully twenty-six years and along which he’d bent his entire body back and forth with every stride like a the deputy caretaker of a synagogue during the recitation of the Eighteen Benedictions.
*

Recognizing him from where she sat on her verandah, the rabbi’s wife rose and began slowly walking toward him:

—So indeed, so indeed … How else? Now you’re whole and healthy, may no evil eye afflict you, like everyone else.

She fell into conversation with him about his operation, about his brother who, report had it, had started prospering and was becoming a rich man, and about the fact that her daughter Hanke must certainly have forgotten everything she’d once spent almost a year studying with him. She’d greatly appreciate it if Lipkis would specifically check up on this:

—Could Hanke still write from dictation?

So Lipkis went into the house and checked up on whether Hanke still knew anything.

Everything was quiet and the rabbi’s wife was no longer standing at his side. Hanke sat at the table writing as he walked about, dictating slowly, glancing up at the ceiling and across at the walls of the room in which, for six weeks, Mirel had lived. Several bits and pieces that she’d left behind lay scattered about in the open closet, among them a small crumpled sheet of paper half-covered with writing. Plucking it out, Lipkis recognized it as a letter Mirel had begun but never completed. It read:

—Again, Montchik, nothing has come of any of the plans I’d thought to make. Everything I think of always comes to nothing. Herz is very unjust to me. Earlier, I used to find this distressing: I spoke to him about those things that pained me, and he responded with reference to some remnants of a generation that no longer had any place in life. But now all this is over too, and it is difficult for me to speak of it. I can no longer stay where I am at present. I have no idea where, but I must go far away from here. Yellow leaves are already falling from the trees, and this fall season is replicated in my heart. I’m living through the autumn of my life, Montchik; I’ve been living through it since the day of my birth, and I’ve never known a spring. The thought that someone else has lived through my springtime grows more and more obvious to me from day to day: even before I was born, someone else had lived out my springtime.

*
In the Orthodox Jewish tradition, the monthly reappearance of the moon is recognized with praise to the Creator through a liturgical blessing recited in the open air, facing the moon, preferably in a prayer quorum of ten adult males.

*
Shivah (Hebrew “seven”) is the name given to the week-long period of mourning mandated by Jewish law for first-degree relatives: father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, or spouse. To spare the mourners the strain of leaving the place where they are observing the Seven Days of Mourning, it is customary to gather a prayer quorum to recite the prescribed weekday services twice a day.

†
The afternoon and evening services are customarily recited one after the other in the late afternoon.

*
A mezuzah (Hebrew, “doorpost”) is a piece of parchment contained in a case, inscribed with the Hebrew verses Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and 11:13–21, and affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes.

*
In memory of the dead, it is customary to study chapters from the Mishnah, a third-century collection of rabbinic debates on the Torah. The Mishnah consists of six orders, each containing seven to twelve tractates. There may be many chapters of Mishnah in any given tractate. In the presence of a prayer quorum of ten adult men, a special Kaddish is recited upon the completion of this study.

*
This wall of the synagogue, which faces east toward Jerusalem, is where the Ark housing the scrolls of the Torah is located and where seats are reserved for the rabbi and other dignitaries.

*
In the Jewish tradition, helping people to help themselves with an interest-free loan is regarded as the highest form of charity.

*
It is customary to snack on fruit during the Sabbath since it requires no cooking.

*
The rabbi’s wife tries to appear sophisticated by using not merely Polish Yiddish, but a dialect specific to Warsaw. Its affected sing-song intonation can sound pretentious and vulgar. For Bergelson’s characters, as for Bergelson himself, high culture was associated with Russia and Germany, not with Poland.

*
Because taxes gathered on the sale of liquor were a key element of government finance in tsarist Russia, the liquor trade was strictly regulated by government decrees. Purveying liquor as innkeepers and publicans became one of the traditional occupations of Jews in the Pale of Settlement.

†
In tsarist Russia, external students were permitted to attend lectures, but were not officially enrolled in the university and were therefore not entitled to graduate. Often these were students who had not passed the matriculation examination at a gymnasium, which required proficiency in both Latin and Greek. In the later years of Romanov rule, to become external students was the only way many Jews, restricted by the discriminatory quota system, could attend university courses.

*
The ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av (corresponding to July/August in the secular Western calendar) is Tisha B’Av, an annual fast day commemorating the two Destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively. The days leading up to Tisha B’Av are known as “The Nine Days,” during which the strictly observant refrain from eating meat and from pleasurable activities such as listening to music.

*
Boric (also called boracic or orthoboric) acid, often used as an antiseptic, exists in the form of colorless crystals or white powder and dissolves in water.

*
The Eighteen Benedictions are recited in silence while standing and facing Jerusalem three times each day, at the morning, afternoon, and evening services, respectively. Rocking back and forth while reciting this prayer is regarded as a mark of piety.