Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Someone came over and tapped me on the shoulder—it was one of the young poets.

  He said: “You still read this nonsense?”

  “Do me a favor and read just this page!”

  He took the book and glanced at it.

  “Old wives’ tales, hallucinations, crap! Opium to lull the masses!”

  We talked awhile, and he said: “Are you still looking for a room?”

  “Yes, very much so.”

  “I know of a woman who wants to give up a room. She’s a distant relative of mine, a granddaughter of rabbis. If the room isn’t rented yet, you’ll fall into paradise. She’s one of your kind, a bit touched. She sits at a tilting table all night and tries to look into the future. Her father was a rabbi who went off his head. She tries to write, to paint. She’s gone through three husbands already.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She could be your mother, but she likes young fellows. Wait, it seems I’ve jotted down her address somewhere.”

  He took out a notebook which was filled with addresses and with poems inscribed in tiny letters. He found the address and gave it to me.

  I asked whether the woman had a telephone, and he replied: “She used to, but it’s been shut off. She would have been evicted, too, but the landlord is a Chassid of her uncle.”

  The woman lived somewhere on Gesia Street near the Jewish cemetery. “I won’t get involved with her,” I promptly resolved. I abhorred dissolute females. I longed for a woman who would be pure and chaste and would learn about love only from me. Still, I headed straight for Gesia Street. The closer I came to the house, the more funerals I saw—one hearse after another, some followed by weeping women, others without mourners. Here I was looking for a room, but these people had already finished living, hoping, and suffering and were being transported to eternity. The horses took step after deliberate step. They were draped in black cloths with holes cut out for eyes, and these holes were filled with pupil. I imagined that those horses knew what they were transporting and that they were making an accounting of their own souls. If the cabalists were right that everything is godliness, the horses were part of God, too ….

  I entered a courtyard with peeling walls and a huge garbage bin in the center much like on Krochmalna Street where my family used to live. A huckster with a sack over his shoulders cried: “I buy clo’! I buy clo’! I buy clo’!” and cast his eyes upward toward the topmost windows. The sun stood fixed in the center of the sky and poured gold down upon the cobblestones, the gutters, the raggedy children, the huckster’s reddish beard. A spring breeze blew carrying the smells of blossoms and the manure used to fertilize the fields. I even thought that I detected the stench of the corpses. I climbed three flights and came to rest before a door that thirty years ago might have been red but was now a faded brown. The door handle dangled listlessly; the number on the door was half off. I knocked, but no one answered. “I knew that I was wasting my time,” I told myself. I was filled with envy for the dead, who were provided with perpetual quarters and with everything else a corpse didn’t need …. I knocked again and again. I was too exhausted to go on looking for rooms. Suddenly I heard a woman’s voice behind me. I looked backward and saw the lady of the house. She appeared to be in her late thirties or possibly forty. Although it was a weekday, she wore a silk cape and a black dress that wasn’t fashionably short but hung almost to the ankles. Over her red hair—also unstylishly long and combed into a chignon—sat a black silk hat, the kind that was worn forty years prior. Her face was white, her eyes a blend of green and yellow. One glance sufficed to note that she had once been a beauty. In one hand she carried a purse, in the other a basket of groceries. She had apparently just been shopping.

  “May I know, young man, whom you’re looking for?”

  I took out the piece of paper on which the young poet had scribbled her name and address and said: “Mrs. Gina Halbstark.”

  “I am Gina Halbstark.”

  The woman (I’m not giving her right name here) stopped, and we confronted each other. She appeared both girlish and prematurely aged, like someone who has just gotten up from an illness. Her cheeks were sunken, her chin was narrow, her nose thin, her neck long, her red hair faded. Earrings were dangling from her lobes. For all her fancy dress there was a kind of genteel seediness about her. Her eyes reflected curiosity as well as a familial intimacy as if by some mysterious instinct she would have known who I was and why I had come. I moved aside, and she unlocked the door and led me into a corridor and from there into a big room. The apartment exuded the same genteel air of neglect as its owner. She asked me to sit down and opened the door to a tiny cubicle, an alcove with apparently no windows, since it was dark in there. She went off and tarried a long time, then came back wearing a house coat, her hair combed and her face powdered—all this before I even told her the reason for my visit. I asked her if she had a room to rent, and she said: “Yes, but only for a bat who doesn’t need light.”

  “I’m a bat,” I said.

  “You don’t look it,” she countered, “but you can never tell what a person is.”

  We began to talk, and literally within minutes there evolved between us a kind of intimacy that astounded me. One moment we were strangers and the next we were chatting away as if we had been friends for years. She recounted her genealogy to me, and I learned all about her grandfathers and great-grandfathers, the books they had written, their honorable lives and piety. She told me who her first husband had been—I had heard of his father. She herself had grown “corrupt” early in life and had turned to worldly Yiddish and enlightened Hebrew books by such authors as Isaac Joel Linetzki, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Abraham Mapu, Shalom Aleichem, Peretz, as well as Yiddish translations of Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Lermontov, Knut. Hamsun, Strindberg, and such Polish writers as Mickiewicz, Slowacki, Wyspianski, and Przybyszewski. Not only had I read exactly the same books but I was thoroughly familiar with their appearance, the number of pages they contained, and who their publishers and translators were.

  Gina Halbstark had read my brother’s works, and she even knew about me. I asked her how this could be, and she retorted: “Warsaw is a small town.”

  As if of its own volition the conversation drifted to the occult powers, and when Gina heard that I was interested in such things, her face grew animated and youthful. In that very dark room that she was trying to rent she kept a whole library of books and magazines devoted to these topics. She took me into the room and switched on the light. I saw a caseful of books on theosophy, spiritualism, hypnotism, and animal magnetism, in Polish, German, and French, and stacks of magazines.

  I asked her how much the rent would be, and she said: “You’ll pay whatever you can afford.”

  And she smiled with rabbinical amiability and said that she would prepare lunch for me.

  “What have I done to deserve this?” I asked, and she replied: “Because I like you.”

  I followed her out, and in the corridor I embraced her and we began to kiss with the fervor of reunited lovers. She kissed and bit me. “I know you from an earlier life ….”

  Eleven

  God in Heaven—what a great stroke of luck had befallen me! I had been prepared to throw back to God His gift in a rage, but I was obviously destined to still live, suffer, to wrong myself and others. I sprawled now on the very same bed where I had lain with Gina, and I slept, probably like Esau did after he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. In my dreams I was in Warsaw, in Bilgorai, and in the town where my father was rabbi. Gina and Todros the watchmaker’s daughter merged into one and at the same time became my mother and my sister Hindele. “What’s happening to me?” I exclaimed in my sleep. “I’m losing the world to come!”

  Someone within me—my father? my grandfather? a head of a yeshivah?—conducted a sermon and admonished me: “You’ve desecrated your soul. You are defiled! You’ve copulated with Lilith, Naamah, Machlat, Shibta! ….”

  This dream was a continuation of the reality. In b
ed with me Gina spoke like both a holy woman and a whore. She screamed so loud I was afraid the neighbors would come running. She sang, wept, quoted passages from the Song of Songs, called herself Rahab the harlot. It was she who had saved the spies that Joshua son of Nun had sent out to spy on Jericho, and they had lain in her arms. I, Itchele, was one of them. In other reincarnations I was Abraham and she Hagar, I Reuben and she Bilhah, I Boaz and she Ruth, I David and she Bath-sheba …. She whispered secrets and licked my ear. She promptly began to instruct me in new positions, variations, and in her own mad caprices. I questioned her about her former husbands and lovers, and she bellowed: “I long for them all! I’d like to have them all at the same time so that they would tear me to pieces and leave nothing of me to bury! They should spit upon me and drown me in their saliva ….”

  I had read Forel and maybe Krafft-Ebing, too, and I already knew about sadism, masochism, fetishism, and a number of other such isms, but all that which was paper and ink there turned here into throbbing life, savage lust, a singing and lamenting madness. She roused both desire and revulsion within me. We had spent a spring day in a wakeful nightmare and now the dream added its own absurdities.

  I opened my eyes, and it was dark not only here but in the other room, too. Instead of making lunch for me, Gina prepared dinner. The smells of meat, potatoes, onion, garlic, carried from the kitchen. She sang there and poured water into sizzling stew. I had awakened thirsty, hungry, tired, yet eager for new larks and adventures. “Am I happy?” I asked myself, and someone within me replied: “No.” “Why not?” I countered, but the other remained silent. I cocked my ears and listened to myself. My ideal had always been a decent Jewish daughter, not some whore who had wallowed in every slime. I partly loved this Gina, partly hated her. The preacher from my dream seized upon this and argued: “It’s because of such abominations that the whole human race suffers. The Canaanites and Amalekites committed such outrages. It was her kind that caused the damnation of cities. Wars and violence stem from adultery. It was her kind that gave themselves over to the enemies of Israel, and it was their children who made pogroms upon the Jews ….”

  My head fell back against the pillow, and I lay there in mute bewilderment. I had promised my father that I would conduct myself as a Jew in Warsaw. On the way here I had even related my philosophy of protest to Jewishness. The Jew personified the protest against the injustices of nature and even those of the Creator. Nature wanted death, but the Jew opted for life; nature wanted licentiousness, but the Jew asked for restraint; nature wanted war, but the Jew, particularly the Diaspora Jew (the highly developed Jew), sought peace. The Ten Commandments were in themselves a protest against the laws of nature. The Jew had taken upon himself the mission of vanquishing nature and of harnessing it in such a way that it served the Ten Commandments. Because the Jew went against nature, it despised him and took revenge upon him. But the victory lay on the side of the Jew. Even if he had to wage war against God, the Jew would not desist. According to the Talmud, even a voice from heaven should be ignored if it is not on the side of justice. When the Jew knew that something was right, he dared oppose the Almighty Himself ….

  These had been my thoughts on the train when the hooligans ordered the Jews to sing “Come, My Beloved.” At that time the faces of the Jews had shown a resoluteness that was not of this world. Well, but this kind of strength lay only within the Jew who observed the Torah, not in the modern Jew who served nature like the Gentile, was subservient to it, and placed all his hopes upon it ….

  I heard footsteps. Gina stood in the doorway.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “You dozed off like an infant at my breast. Are you hungry?”

  “No. Yes.”

  “Come eat. Come, I need you. You are my last hope. I was ready to die already, but suddenly you came and—”

  She switched on the light, but I asked her to put it out again. I was ashamed before her. She had put on a costly robe, but I had nothing besides the clothes I had come in. In the course of the single day my cheeks had sprouted a sharp stubble. Gina went back to the kitchen while I fumbled with my garments and shoes in the dark.

  Later when we were eating, Gina confided that she had anticipated my arrival and had actually been waiting for me. She practiced automatic writing, and one night her hand had written my name perhaps a hundred times. She often posed questions to a table with wooden pegs and to a Ouija board, and they both concurred that her great and last lover would be as red-haired as she was. She told me that she knew some other things about me which she couldn’t reveal to me as yet. She tipped her head to the side and studied me sidelong with female expertise and not without mockery, as if she would have played a trick on me which would become apparent to me later. I felt ashamed of myself in view of her sexual experience, and I thought of the many men she had had before me.

  She seemed to guess my thoughts because she said: “You’ve wiped them all away. From now on, you’re my whole life.”

  We drank tea, and stories poured from Gina’s lips. She had caught typhus during the war and been taken to a hospital where the doctors tried to poison her. She wouldn’t be alive now but for her dead grandmother who came to her in a dream and warned her not to take the medicine. This same grandmother had saved her from death several other times. Once when she lay all alone in the house ill with influenza and without any food (it was after her second divorce), this same grandmother brought her a glass of warm milk.

  Gina stood up and solemnly vowed that she was speaking the truth. The glass on her night table had been empty. Suddenly, it had filled with milk, and she had heard her grandmother’s voice: “Drink!” As soon as she drank the milk, her fever subsided and she recovered.

  “Believe me or don’t—what does it matter to me what you believe? You won’t give me your millions in any case, but I swear on my dead mother and father, may they rest in peace, that I’m not lying to you. If I’m lying, may I not live to—”

  “I believe you, I believe you, but it could have been a hallucination that came from the fever.”

  “I knew that’s what you would say. It was no hallucination. My temperature was only 98.6°. Even when it rises above 104°, I remain fully conscious. I once had an operation for my appendix, and the doctor couldn’t put me to sleep with the chloroform no matter how he tried. He gave me the biggest possible dose, and still I remained conscious. I felt the pains when they cut into me, and I heard every word he said to the nurses. Incidentally, in the middle of the operation I suddenly began to fly in the air. I glanced down and saw my body, the surgeon, the nurses, and all the rest. This was the first time I went into the astral plane and you can imagine my terror when I saw my own body lying there. I was sure that I was dead. All of a sudden something trembled within me, and I re-entered my body and felt the pains anew. The doctor told me later that my heart had stopped for a while and he had thought I was done for. Why am I telling you all this? Yes, to prove that I don’t lose consciousness so easily. I sleep and at the same time I hear every rustle and think wakeful thoughts. I didn’t have even a lick of milk in the house at that time. I had nothing at all. Suddenly a glass of milk stood there before me. When I drank it, it tasted as if it had come fresh from the udder. Each sip brought a surge of strength with it. I also heard my grandmother’s voice as clearly as I hear you now. What do you say to this, eh?”

  “If the dead live and can milk a cow in a hurry and bring a glass of milk through a closed door, then our whole science isn’t worth a fig. In that case—”

  “Yes, they do live and they can do many things. Not all the souls remain below—most of them go off to other worlds. But my grandmother was terribly close to me, and she didn’t want to be parted from me. She knew my accursed nature and crazy ways and how easy it was for me to risk my life. If not for her I wouldn’t be here now. Don’t laugh, but my grandmother even told me about you. One time she spent half the night with me. I said: ‘Grandma, I don’t want t
o live anymore. I’ve had enough of the disappointments, of men’s falsehood and all the rest. So long as there is another world,’ I said, ‘a prettier world without evil and boorishness and all the unhappiness and complications. I’d rather be there. I want to be with you, Grandma,’ I said. I’m not a crier by nature, but I began to weep furiously, and she said: ‘Genendele’—that’s what she called me—‘it’s not our world but God’s, and everyone who is sent there has some mission and a time in which to perform it. Your time to leave hasn’t come yet. Some good still awaits you.’ ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Another man?’ And she said, ‘He is still a child, but he is also a man and he will be your final comfort.’ She said something else, but I don’t want to tell you what. First you spoke like a believer, and all of a sudden you become a skeptic and look at me as if I were crazy.”

  “I believe in God, but there are things that are awfully hard to accept.”

  “Eh? If you will stay with me, you’ll see things with your own eyes so that you’ll be spared having to believe in them. I was resolved not to tell you what my grandmother said about us—it seems she even warned me against talking to you about her, but she is used to it now that I disobey her. I wish I had listened to her—I would have spared myself lots of heartache.”

  “What did she say about us?”

  “She said that we would collaborate on a book.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t give me any details. I want you to know that she has never yet told me anything that hasn’t come true. Sometimes immediately, other times years later. But the last time she spoke to me I did begin to feel something like doubt. I had taken a holy vow to have nothing further to do with any other man and certainly not with one younger than I. I had also given up my writing. Whatever I wrote the editors sent back. They often sent back things they hadn’t even bothered to read. This, as the saying goes, is a chapter in itself. I have countless enemies. They hate me, first of all because God cursed me with talent, and secondly because they know that I’m wise to all their filthy tricks and intrigues and that I can’t be so easily fooled. It’s enough for me to glance at a person to know all his secrets. Believe me this is no idle boast. Nor is it a favorable trait either. Actually, it’s a tragedy. God capped the brain with a skull so that others shouldn’t see what goes on inside it. How can you live knowing what someone else is thinking? Thirdly, they hate me because I come from the finest stock while they are all boors from the very dregs. Why am I telling you all this, eh? Yes, they hate me. They would drown me in a spoonful of warm water, as the saying goes. Therefore, since there was no longer any hope of love or literature for me, what sense did it make for me to go on living? But since my grandmother said that we must write a book together, we will write a book whether you want to or not.”