More Stories From My Father's Court

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “What are you doing, you rascal!” Father scolded me good-naturedly.

  A horrible thought took hold of me: he could have been converted, too, God forbid … Father could have become a gentile. A cold chill ran through me and a lump knotted my throat. Anything could happen to a human being. A man could even be slaughtered like an animal and his flesh chopped on a butcher block.

  “Why are you looking at me like that? What are you thinking? Why aren’t you studying?” Father asked me.

  I kissed Father on the forehead. “Stay the way you are!”

  THE TINSMITH AND THE HOUSEMAID

  One sees all kinds of unhappy people in the course of one’s life, but the young couple I will now depict were unhappy in an unusual way. It wasn’t until years later that I began to understand what had happened.

  It began with the couple getting married in our apartment. Since both were short, they looked younger than they really were. He was a tinsmith, and she had once been a housemaid. He was swarthy, Oriental-looking, and prematurely balding, with a high forehead. His coal-black eyes had a strange glow. I had seen him several times clambering barefoot on slanty rooftops with feline agility.

  The woman was broad-set, with a big shock of wiry hair, a flat nose, and thick lips. For many years she had worked as a maid, had assembled a trousseau, and had saved up money for a dowry. The two met and married immediately. Both were orphans.

  Husband and wife rented a fairly nice apartment, which they furnished. He worked for a master tinsmith, and she, his young wife, was now the mistress of the household and went to market with her basket. For the first couple of weeks it seemed that everything was going well.

  Then an argument broke out. The wife came to us to complain that her husband constantly grumbled, picked on her, and reproached her. She didn’t speak with Father but with Mother.

  “What does he want from you?” Mother asked.

  “Rebbetzin, I don’t know. I give him a plate of food straight from the fire and he shouts that it’s cold. Here he says I’ve over-salted the food and there he says it has no salt at all. The soup is too watery, the meat is too hard, the milk is curdled. He interferes in my household affairs, too. I have to account to him for every penny, and if a penny is missing, he makes such a fuss that all the neighbors hear it.”

  “Has he always been so stingy?”

  “No. When he was engaged to me, he threw money around. I would have to restrain him not to spend so much.”

  “Perhaps he’s angry about something.”

  “Why should he be angry? I haven’t caused him any harm …”

  “Perhaps his boss is giving him trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps he’s not well.”

  “I haven’t got the faintest idea.”

  Mother gave the woman the eternal womanly advice: Wait, have patience, sometimes a crazy notion gets into a man’s head. Sometimes a man suffers but doesn’t want to talk about it—so he takes it out on his wife. What can one do? One must put up with everything. With time, when a man sees that his wife is loyal and devoted to him, he becomes nice and stays that way.

  This is what Mother said. I heard her advice and was pleased that she spoke with such respect about men. When I grew up, I too would become a man …

  The woman left, apparently ready to obey Mother.

  But instead of being good and submissive, the woman drank half a bottle of essence of vinegar after their next argument, then ran at once to a neighbor’s apartment with burned lips, groaning, “Help me!”

  They called out the rescue-squad wagon and the attendants pumped the woman’s stomach.

  A couple of weeks later a fire broke out in their apartment. The woman opened the window that faced the courtyard and shouted, “Help! Fire!”

  Someone telephoned the fire department, and they came at once with their wild horses. First the firemen smashed all the windows in the apartment, then they broke the new furniture, and only then did they extinguish the flames. The fire itself was a mystery. The woman said that she had opened her clothes closet and a fire ensued.

  “How do you get flames in a clothes closet?” her neighbors wanted to know.

  “I ask you!” she replied.

  Some time passed. Then one day the street suddenly turned black with people. The young tinsmith had fallen off a roof. He wasn’t killed, but he had broken a leg. His fall was also a mystery—the roof was less steep than others and he had been standing next to the chimney. There had been no wind. In the hospital, he told people who had come to visit him to learn what had happened that he felt as if two hands had seized him by the shoulders and pushed him. He had tried to hold on to the roof’s gutters, but that other, the one who had pushed him, was stronger than he.

  “Wait a minute. Who was pushing you?”

  “It must’ve been a demon.”

  “In the middle of the day?”

  “Well, you see what happened.”

  People could not understand. On the other hand, on occasion tinsmiths fall from roofs. That business with the hands was probably his imagination. But clearly ill luck was plaguing the couple.

  Soon the tinsmith left the hospital and the woman became pregnant. It seemed that everything was now going smoothly. But then the woman had a miscarriage. She declared that she was standing in the kitchen, cooking soup, when the door suddenly opened and a black cat ran in. Her sudden fright caused hemorrhaging.

  “Perhaps the door was open,” someone suggested.

  “No. It was shut. Someone turned the handle and let the cat in.”

  “Who could that have been?”

  “I know like you know.”

  People on the street began saying all kinds of things. Some said that the misfortunes were occurring because the woman had the same name as her husband’s mother. Others suspected that she wasn’t heeding carefully the laws of family purity and wasn’t going to the ritual bath at the proper time. Father told a scribe to inspect the mezuzahs. He also lent the couple a volume of the Zohar, which was considered a charm to drive demons from one’s house.

  For a while it was quiet. Then, one Friday night, the woman ate a chicken head and the beak got stuck either in her gullet or in her windpipe. Cries for help broke out in the courtyard. Once again the rescue squad was called and a doctor removed the chicken head from the woman’s throat. The doctor declared that had he arrived ten minutes later he wouldn’t have found her alive.

  One misfortune came on the heels of another. The courtyard gaped and was astounded. It was obvious that something was amiss. Evil powers had besieged the couple. But why them?

  There was another round of fires. Not great conflagrations but smaller fires. A garbage container burst into flames all by itself and flickered with a hellish fire. The woman quickly doused it with a pitcher of water. Two hours later, when she went into her bedroom, she saw a little flame bouncing around the bedcover, which she smothered with a jacket. A day or two later, a curtain caught fire and burned.

  Each time the woman came running to my father, but Father told her to see a Hasidic rebbe. Such things were not his specialty. She needed a Hasidic master who could give her amulets, pieces of amber over which spells were cast, or other charms to drive away demons. During those years great rebbes did not yet live in Warsaw (they started arriving only after World War I). The woman went off to see a small-time rebbe. He told her to place pieces of garlic on the walls, a remedy against ghosts and imps. The woman bought a wreath of garlic and placed cloves on all the walls. But they did not help.

  Once, while she was scraping the scales off a fish, a scale slid under her nail. Her finger swelled up and she developed a high fever. Gangrene almost set in, but a doctor performed a minor operation, after which her hand began improving. I don’t remember all the misfortunes that plagued that house. I only remember that one trouble followed another; however, they never suffered a full-fledged tragedy. It seemed that the dark powers wanted to frighten them more than kill them.


  During those years a famous fortune-teller and reader of cards named Schiller Shkolnick lived in Warsaw. He placed advertisements in newspapers stating that he gave advice and could read cards, could find stolen goods or lost relatives. It was said that he had a black mirror hanging in a dark room in which a deserted wife could find her vanished husband. My father told the woman that she was forbidden to go to him because his deeds smacked of magic, pagan customs, and the black arts of the nations who had lived in the Land of Israel before Jews had conquered it. But neighbors convinced the woman that Schiller Shkolnick was the only one who could help her.

  Supposedly, when she went to see Schiller Shkolnick, he wrote all sorts of charms and told her all kinds of things. But precisely what he did and said I don’t know. I only remember people saying that he, the famous Schiller Shkolnick, could not help either.

  After that the husband and wife came to Father and asked him to divorce them. Father never rushed through with a divorce. He advised them to move out of their apartment.

  “The Talmud teaches that he who changes his place changes his luck,” he declared. “It happens that sometimes an apartment is unlucky. There’s always time to get a divorce.”

  Apparently the couple was not too anxious to divorce. They moved out of the apartment and found a new one somewhere in the fancier district, either on Mizke Street or on Mila Lane.

  Strangely, this simple remedy helped. We began hearing good news about them. Their troubles had ceased. The woman became pregnant again. The tinsmith found work with another master.

  The landlord of the previous apartment house was angry at Father. For several months the apartment remained empty. Finally, a gentile moved in. It seemed that the spirits had a score to settle only with that couple—the goy they left alone.

  The master tinsmith came to visit us once in a while, and he often spoke about the couple. They had stopped arguing and now they lived like a pair of doves. The woman completed her pregnancy and gave birth to a boy. She was terrified before her lying-in, because it was known that demons have power over a woman in labor. But everything went well. The child was healthy. Now everything was fine and dandy with them.

  I said earlier that only lately have I begun to understand what happened with that couple. But I’m still not sure that I really understand it.

  A Freudian might interpret all of this as follows: The husband and wife subconsciously tried to sabotage their life together. Perhaps he or she had another love. Perhaps they weren’t happy sexually. It is easy to hang the blame for everything on sex and the subconscious.

  One might also say that the couple was the victim of a poltergeist, the same sort of spirit which several months ago emptied bottles of liquid in a house on Long Island and threw things with an invisible hand. But what is a poltergeist? And why did he beset that particular apartment? This belongs to that category of things where the facts are known but no cogent explanation for them exists. Yes, it is connected with a person’s spiritual attitude. That much is certain. Our inner attitude and outer circumstances are closely bound together. But what sort of connection exists and how it operates—that has not yet been discovered. Only during the past few years have people come to realize that such a link does indeed exist.

  WHAT’S THE PURPOSE OF SUCH A LIFE?

  Those who understand human nature and contemplate its affairs realize that one person can never really know another. People do things which seem to make no sense at all.

  For example: the middle-aged man who married a woman fifteen years younger and then began to work as a salesman, traveling the length and breadth of Russia to sell the products of a big firm on commission. He got married, let’s say on a Tuesday, and then on Sunday, even before the traditional seven days of celebration had ended, his wife was accompanying him to the train bound for Petersburg. He had planned to be away three months, but ended up traversing all of Russia up to the Chinese border and didn’t return until seven months later.

  He remained in Warsaw three weeks and then departed once more. When he came back again, the traveling salesman found a baby in a cradle—his own.

  I won’t recount all his trips here. At the lawsuit his wife listed each one in detail. He had been at home no more than one month during the year and sometimes not even that long. Another child was born. The children were already seven and eight, but they did not really know their father. He came, brought presents, and once more began preparing for another journey. After each trip he would promise his wife that his roaming and roving had ended, but he never kept his word.

  He looked like a traveling salesman: average height, rather chubby, with a black mustache and the smile of a peddler. He had a premature potbelly on which hung the gold chain of a pocketwatch. He dressed fashionably: a derby, a pinstriped suit, a stiff collar with rounded edges, and a black necktie. His boots were polished to a high shine. Even the way he inserted a finger into his vest pocket and lit his cigarettes with a lighter proved he was a worldly man.

  He said in a pleasantly hoarse voice, “Is it my fault I have such a livelihood? This is how I make my living. This is how I support my family.”

  The way he blew smoke rings through his nose and from the side of his mouth showed me, the little boy, that he was full of grown-up cleverness and that he knew what he was talking about.

  But above all, I liked his cuffs with the gilt cuff links set with blue gemstones. A man with such cuffs just doesn’t babble aimlessly.

  But his short wife, who had a girlish face and wore a hat over her head of girlish hair, countered, “What kind of a living is this? He goes away for years on end. I’m a living widow and the children are living orphans. On Pesach I have to go to my mother’s for the Seder …” The woman took out a small handkerchief and wiped away a solitary tear.

  Father placed his hand on his forehead and asked, “So what do you want?”

  “Rather than live such a life, it would be better for him to divorce me,” the woman said. “I can’t go on like this. It’s a miserable way to live.”

  “What do you say?” Father asked the husband.

  “Rabbi, if she wants to divorce me, I won’t force her to stay. My principle is that two people have to want a marriage. If one side is dissatisfied, it’s no good.”

  The word “marriage” smacked of storybooks and novels serialized in the newspapers. Even the word “dissatisfied” had a Germanic ring.

  Mother came in and asked, “What’s the purpose of such a life?”

  She said it partly to the woman and partly to the man. The traveling salesman smiled sweetly, displaying some of the gold in his teeth. His words, too, were golden: “What shall I do, Rebbetzin? Every person has his occupation. Do you think it’s a pleasure to sit days on end in a train? One day I’m in Moscow, the next I’m in Petersburg; one day I’m in Nizhny Novgorod, and the next I’m in Vladivostok. And furthermore, living in hotels is no pleasure either. I long for my own bed and my wife. But no sooner do I want to return home than I get a telegram from my firm to go to the Caucasus, or the devil knows where. Then I have to pick up my suitcase and run to the terminal once again …”

  “Children must have a father …”

  “Of course, but my situation is such that I can see my children only once a year.”

  I was only a little boy at the time, but still I sensed that this man was not as unhappy as he pretended to be. A joke always seemed to hover on his thick lips. He apparently enjoyed these trips immensely. His eyes gleamed with oily satisfaction and pride that he was needed by his firm and was obliged to undertake such lengthy journeys. It seemed he felt quite at home in all these trains, terminals, hotels. By now I had already heard readings of the Sholom Aleichem railroad story about two traveling salesmen who played cards on the backside of a Greek Orthodox priest—and it seemed to me that this traveling salesman was one of those two men. He sits in the train, drinks tea, plays cards, and tells stories. Who knows what could have taken place in all those far-flung places?

/>   After lengthy discussions the traveling salesman promised that he would try to persuade his firm to have him travel less and do more work in Warsaw. He took his wife by the arm and departed with her. Even his manner of walking was sly and deceitful. I noticed that two round pieces of rubber had been added to his heels to make him taller. One could not hear his footfalls. I sensed (or perhaps I realize it only now) that his wife and children were no more than a joke for him—one of the countless comic and entertaining anecdotes which traveling salesmen tell on trains to one another or to perfect strangers.

  After a period of not going to the cheder, I was enrolled by my parents once again. It so happened that this was the same cheder that the older son of the traveling salesman was attending. He did not study with my teacher, who taught Talmud, but with the teacher’s son, who taught the beginners’ class. The boy had a gentile first name: Kuba. He attended cheder for only a few hours, because he also studied in public school. He came and went as he wished. The boy was a copy of his father: chubby, swarthy, with a pair of dark, laughing eyes, full lips, and dimpled cheeks. His pockets were always laden with nuts, chocolates, caramels, and all kinds of toys. Despite his age he was full of stories. He didn’t know that his parents had come to us to initiate a lawsuit, but I did know and played dumb. Children often have a good sense of what can be discussed and what must be kept secret. I already knew not to tell tales out of school …

  Kuba was always blathering about his papa: how he traveled, how he saw everything, and what kinds of presents he brought every time he returned home. The boy had a set of trains with tracks and other such toys. Even the trifles he brought to cheder were treasures. He had, for example, an ivory pen whose shaft had a tiny window. Looking into it one could see the city of Cracow. He also had colored pencils and even a little box of colors with which one could paint only when they were wet with spittle.