The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “I know what you’re about to ask me—have a little patience. Yes, I lived with them both. I married Dora officially in Germany—she wanted to stand under a canopy and she did—but, in actuality, I had two wives, two sisters, just like the patriarch Jacob. All I lacked was a Bilhah and a Zilpah. What would stop the likes of me? Not the Jewish and certainly not the Gentile laws. In the war, the whole human culture crumbled like a ruin. In the camps—not only in Germany but in Russia and later in the DP camps where the refugees lived for years—all shame vanished. I knew of one case where a woman had her husband on one side and her lover on the other and all three of them lived together. I’ve witnessed so many wild things that to me they’ve become normal. A Schicklgruber or a Dzhugashvili comes along and moves the clock back ten thousand years. Not completely, mind you. There were also instances of rare piety and of self-sacrifice for a minor law in the Shulchan Aruch, or even for some custom. This itself may be a bit of wildness, too.

  “I didn’t want all this. It’s one thing to have an adventure—it’s quite another to make a permanent institution out of it. But it was out of my hands. From the moment the two sisters met, I was no longer a free man. They enslaved me with their love for me, their love toward each other, and their jealousy. One minute they would be kissing and crying from great devotion and suddenly they would begin to slug away, pull hair, and curse each other with words you wouldn’t hear in the underworld. I had never before seen such hysteria or heard such screams. Every few days one of the sisters, or sometimes both, tried to commit suicide. One moment it would be quiet. The three of us might be sitting eating or discussing a book or picture—all of a sudden a horrible shriek and both sisters would be rolling on the floor, tearing pieces from each other. I’d run up, trying to separate them, but I’d catch a slam in the face or a bite and the blood would be dripping from me. Why they were fighting I would never know. Fortunately, we lived on the upper story, a garret, and we had no neighbors on our floor. One of the sisters would run to the window and try to throw herself out, while the other seized a knife and went for her own throat. I’d grab one by the leg and take the knife away from the other. They’d howl at me and at each other. I’d try to find out what caused the outburst, but I learned in time that they didn’t know the reason themselves. At the same time, I want you to know that both of them were intelligent in their own fashion. Dora had excellent taste in literature. She’d offer an opinion about a book and it was accurate to the dot. Ytta was musically inclined. She could sing whole symphonies. When they had the energy, they displayed great capability. They had picked up a sewing machine somewhere and from scraps and pieces they sewed dresses of which the most elegant ladies would be proud. One thing both sisters shared, a complete lack of common sense. Actually, they shared many traits. At times it even seemed to me that they were two bodies with one soul. If there had been a tape recorder to take down the things they said, particularly at night, it would make Dostoevsky seem trite. Complaints against God poured out of them, along with laments for the Holocaust that no pen could transcribe. What a person really is comes out only at night, in the dark. I know now that both of them were born crazy, not the victims of any circumstances. The circumstances, naturally, made everything worse. I myself became a psychopath living with them. Insanity is no less contagious than typhus.

  “Besides squabbling, brawling, telling endless stories of the camps and of their home in Warsaw, and chattering about clothes, fashions, and whatnot, the sisters had one favorite topic: my treachery. They forged an indictment against me that made the Moscow trials seem like pure logic by comparison. Even as they sat on the sofa, kissed me, waged a playful competition over me, and indulged in a game that was both childish and animalistic and therefore indefinable, they kept abusing me. It boiled down to the fact that I had only one urge—to betray them and carry on with other women. Each time the concierge called me to the telephone, they ran to listen in. When I received a letter, they promptly opened it. No dictator could have enforced such a strict censorship as these sisters did over me. They left no doubt that the mailman, the concierge, the Joint Committee, and I were all part of a conspiracy against them, although what kind of conspiracy this was and what was its purpose was something even their twisted minds couldn’t establish. Lombroso contended that genius is insanity. He forgot to say that insanity is genius. Their helplessness was genius too. I sometimes had the feeling that getting through the war had drained them of that specific power for survival that every human and animal possesses. The fact that Ytta hadn’t been able to find another job in Russia besides that of a maid and mistress to that old shoemaker only accented her lack of initiative. They often toyed with the notion of becoming maids in Paris, governesses, or something in that vein, but it was clear both to me and to them that they couldn’t hold any kind of job for more than a few hours. They were also the laziest creatures I had ever met, although from time to time they were seized by a burst of effort and energy that was as exaggerated as their usual laziness. Two women should have been able to keep house, but our apartment was always a mess. They would prepare a meal and argue as to who should wash the dishes until it came time to cook again. Sometimes days and even weeks went by and we ate only dry food. The bedding was often dirty, and we had cockroaches and other vermin. The sisters weren’t physically dirty. They boiled pots of water at night and turned the apartment into a bathhouse. The water dripped down below, and the downstairs tenant, an old French cavalier, banged on our door and threatened us with the police. Paris was starving, but in my house food was thrown out in the garbage. The apartment was piled with rags. They hardly ever wore the dresses that they sewed or received from the Joint Committee, but they went around half naked and barefoot.

  “As alike as the sisters were, so were they also different. Ytta possessed a brutality that was completely foreign to a girl from a Hasidic home. Many of her stories dealt with beatings and I knew that bloodshed and violence of any kind roused her sexually. She told me that, while she was still a girl in her father’s house, she once sharpened a knife and slaughtered three ducks that her mother kept in a shed. Her father beat her for this severely and Dora used to throw this up to her when they quarreled. Ytta was unusually strong, but each time she tried to do something, she managed to hurt herself. She walked around covered with bandages and plasters. She often hinted that she would take revenge on me, even though I had rescued her from slavery and want. I suspected that somewhere inside her she would have been glad to remain with the old shoemaker; maybe because this would have allowed her to forget her family and especially Dora, with whom she maintained a love-hate relationship. This hostility used to come out in every quarrel. Dora was the one who screamed, wept, and scolded, while Ytta resorted to blows. I was often afraid that she might kill Dora in a rage.

  “Dora was better educated, more refined, and possessed of a sick imagination. She slept fitfully and kept telling me her dreams, which were sexual, diabolical, tangled. She awoke quoting verses from the Bible. She tried to write poems in Polish and in Yiddish. She had formulated a sort of personal mythology. I often said that she was possessed by the dybbuk of a follower of Sabbatai Zevi or Jacob Frank.

  “I had always felt a curiosity about the institution of polygamy. Could jealousy be rooted out? Could you share someone you loved? In a sense, the three of us were taking part in an experiment whose results we all awaited. The longer the situation lasted, the more obvious it became to us all that things couldn’t remain the way they were. Something had to happen and we knew that it would be evil, a catastrophe. Each day posed a new crisis, each night carried the threat of some scandal or impotence. Although our neighbors on the lower floors had their own troubles and were accustomed to wild doings from the time of the German Occupation, they began to look at us suspiciously, to nose around, and to shake their heads in disapproval. As sinful as was our behavior, our religious upbringing soon began to make demands on our Jewishness. Dora made the benediction over the Sabbath ca
ndles every Friday and then sat around smoking cigarettes. She had formulated her own version of the Shulchan Aruch in which pork was forbidden but horsemeat was kosher, in which there was no God but you had to fast on Yom Kippur and eat matzo on Passover. Ytta had become an atheist in Russia, or so she said, but every night before going to sleep she mumbled a nightly prayer or some incantation. When I gave her a coin, she spat on it to ward off the evil eye. She would get up in the morning and announce, ‘Today will be an unlucky day … something bad is going to happen …’ Inevitably, what happened was that she hurt herself, or broke a dish, or a stocking tore on her.

  “Dora kept the funds in our household. I always gave her more than she needed, since I received stipends from a few institutions and later money from relatives in America as well. After a while I noticed that she had accumulated a nest egg. Her sister apparently knew of this and received her share of the loot. I often heard them whispering and arguing about money.

  “I forgot the main thing—children. Both sisters wanted a child by me and many arguments erupted because of this. But I was dead set against it. We were living on charity. Each time the conversation came around to children, I came up with the same answer: ‘For what? So the next Hitler would have someone to burn?’ I don’t have a child to this day. As far as I’m concerned, I want to put an end to the human tragedy. I suspect that neither Dora nor Ytta was even capable of bearing children. Such females are like mules. I’ll never understand how a Hasidic Jew came to have two such daughters. We carry stray genes going back to the time of Genghis Khan, or the devil knows when.

  “The calamity that we anticipated came in a quiet fashion. The arguments gradually subsided to be replaced by a depression that consumed the three of us. It began with Dora’s getting sick. Exactly what was wrong with her, I never found out. She lost weight and coughed a lot. I suspected consumption and took her to a doctor, but he found no evidence of illness. He prescribed vitamins and iron, which didn’t help. Dora became frigid, too. She no longer wanted to join in our nightly games and idle chatter. She even got herself a cot and set it up in the kitchen. Without Dora, Ytta soon lost interest in our sex triangle. She had never been the one to take the initiative; in fact, she did only what Dora told her. Ytta was a big eater and a heavy sleeper. She snored and snorted in her sleep. A situation soon developed in which, instead of having two women, I had none. Not only were we silent at night but during the day too; we became steeped in moroseness. Before, I used to get weary from all the babbling, endless wrangling, and extravagant praises the sisters heaped on me, but now I longed for those days. I talked the situation over with the sisters and we decided to put an end to the alienation that lay between us, but such things can’t be changed with decisions. I often had the feeling that some invisible being lurked among us, a phantom who sealed our lips and burdened our spirits. Each time I started to say something, the words stuck in my throat. When I did say it, the words that came out required no answer. I looked on with amazement as the two chatterbox sisters became close-mouthed. All the speech seemed to have been drained from them. I became as taciturn as they. Before, I could babble on for hours without any thought or reflection, but suddenly I became diplomatic and careful to weigh every word, afraid that no matter what I said it would cause a commotion. I used to laugh when I read your stories about dybbuks, but I now actually felt myself possessed. When I wanted to pay Dora a compliment, it came out an insult. Oddly enough, the three of us couldn’t stop yawning. We sat there, yawned, and looked at one another with moist eyes in astonishment, partners in a tragedy we could neither understand nor control.

  “I became impotent too. I lost the urge for the two sisters. I lay in bed nights, and instead of lust, I felt something that can only be called anti-lust. I often had the uncomfortable feeling that my skin was icy cold and my body was shrinking. Although the sisters didn’t mention my impotence, I knew that they were lying in bed with their ears cocked, listening to the strange process taking place within my organs—the ebbing of the blood and the cramping and shrinking of the limbs that seemed to degenerate to the verge of withering. I often imagined that in the dark I saw the silhouette of a figure that was as flimsy and transparent as a spider web—tall, thin, long-haired—a shadowy skeleton with holes instead of eyes, a monster with a crooked mouth that laughed soundlessly. I assured myself that it was nerves. What else could it be? I didn’t believe in ghosts then and I don’t to this day. I became convinced of one thing one night—thoughts and emotions can literally materialize and become entities of some substance. Even now, as I think about it, ants crawl up and down my spine. I’ve never spoken about this to anyone—you’re the first and, I assure you, the last person to ever hear this.

  “It was a spring night in 1948. A spring night in Paris can sometimes be bitter cold. We went to sleep separately—I on the cot, Dora on the sofa, and Ytta in bed. We put out the lights and lay down. I don’t remember such a cold night even in the camps. We covered ourselves with all the blankets and rags we had in the house, but we still couldn’t get warm. I put the sleeves of a sweater over my feet and threw my winter coat over the blanket. Ytta and Dora burrowed into their covers. We did all this without speaking and this silence lent our frantic efforts a brooding oppressiveness that defies description. I remember precisely lying there in bed and thinking that the punishment would come that night. At the same time, I silently prayed to God that it shouldn’t. I lay there for a while half frozen—not only from the cold but from the tension too. I searched in the dark for the shed (as I called the creature of spider webs and shadows), but I saw nothing. At the same time, I knew that he was there, hovering in some corner or possibly even behind the bedboard. I said to myself, ‘Don’t be an idiot, there are no such things as ghosts. If Hitler could slaughter six million Jews and America sends billions of dollars to rebuild Germany, there are no other forces except the material. Ghosts wouldn’t permit such an injustice …’

  “I had to urinate and the toilet was out in the corridor. Usually I can hold myself in, if need be, but this time the urge was too insistent. I got up from the cot and went creeping toward the kitchen door, which led to the outside. I had taken only two steps when someone stopped me. Brother, I know all the answers and all the psychological flimflam, but this thing before me was a person and he blocked my path. I was too frightened to cry out. It’s not in me to scream. I’m sure that I wouldn’t scream even if it were killing me. Well, and who was there to help me, even if I did? The two half-mad sisters? I tried to push him aside and I touched something that might have been rubber, dough, or some sort of foam. There are fears from which you can’t run away. A furious wrangling erupted between us. I pushed him back and he yielded a bit, yet offered resistance. I remember now that I was less afraid of the evil spirit than of the outcry the sisters might raise. I can’t tell you how long this struggle lasted—a minute or perhaps only a few seconds. I thought I would pass out on the spot, but I stood there and stubbornly and silently wrestled with a phantom, or whatever it was. Instead of feeling cold, I became hot. Within a second, I was drenched as if standing under a shower. Why the sisters didn’t scream is something I’ll never understand. That they were awake I am sure. They were apparently terrified of their own fear. Suddenly I caught a blow. The Evil One vanished and I sensed that my organ was no longer there, either. Had he castrated me? My pajama bottoms had fallen. I felt around for my penis. No, he hadn’t torn it out but had jammed it so deep into me that it had formed a negative indentation rather than a positive. Don’t look at me that way! I’m not crazy now and I wasn’t crazy then. During this whole nightmare, I knew that it was nerves—nervousness that had assumed substance. Einstein contends that mass is energy. I say that mass is compressed emotion. Neuroses materialize and take on concrete form. Feelings put on bodies or are themselves bodies. Those are your dybbuks, the sprites, the hobgoblins.

  “I walked out into the corridor on wobbly knees and found the toilet, but I literally had nothing to
urinate with. I read somewhere that in the Arab lands such things happen to men, especially to those who keep harems. Strange, but during the whole excitement I remained calm. Tragedy sometimes brings a kind of brooding resignation that comes from no one knows where.

  “I turned back to the apartment, but neither of the sisters made a rustle. They lay there quiet, tense, barely breathing. Had they cast a spell over me? Were they themselves bewitched? I began to dress slowly. I put on my drawers, my pants, my jacket, and my summer coat. I packed some shirts, socks, and manuscripts in the dark. I gave the two sisters enough time to ask me what I was doing and where I was going, but they didn’t utter a peep. I took my satchel and left in the middle of the night. Those are the bare facts.”