Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “How do you go about writing a book together?”

  “Eh? I don’t know myself. You’ll write a page and I’ll write a page and between pages we’ll kiss. How would you like that?”

  “Very much so!”

  “Well, you’re still completely a child. You’re like a young horse with a growing passion who plays up to his own mother. But you mustn’t have any bad memories of me.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Oh, I won’t be around much longer. Eat all your dessert, don’t leave anything over.”

  Twelve

  I soon noted that Gina was obsessed with death. We lay in bed, and she spoke of buying a plot together at the Gesia Street cemetery. I had to promise her that when my time came I’d be buried beside her. She demanded that right after her funeral I should sleep with another woman and think of her, Gina, at the same time. She made me swear solemnly that I would say Kaddish over her and light a memorial candle. I knew full well that these words roused her sexually. Her flesh turned hot, and she grew fiercely exultant. She cuddled up to me, kissed me, fondled me, and said: “I want to lie in the ground and rot while you, little colt, enjoy yourself! That is my will, my goal. I’ll rest easier knowing that you’re lying in the arms of women, but one thing I beg of you: Don’t forget me. What my grandmother does for me I will do for you—guide and protect you. I’ll provide you females with blazing souls and burning bodies. I’ll cast them into your net like wiggling fish for you to do with them as your heart desires, but with one proviso—that you don’t get married. Why get married? Why tie yourself down? A bee must flit from flower to flower gathering nectar from each. Why should a bee be bound up with one flower? To me you can be bound because I won’t be around for long. I don’t want you to marry me either. Our souls will remain united forever anyhow. Your pleasure will be my pleasure ….”

  We barely eked out an existence. I couldn’t even afford a laundress, and Gina washed my underwear. She herself wore the old-fashioned clothes because she couldn’t afford new dresses. Her apartment hadn’t been painted in years and the furniture was broken, but what did this matter to us? At that time there were stores in Warsaw where you could get fantastic bargains. On Old and New Wolowa you could buy a pair of shoes or even a coat (secondhand) for groschens. There were markets where one could get black army bread for half price. Peasant women brought cheese, mushrooms, groats, and onions from the country that one could buy for next to nothing. Gina and I both enjoyed walking. We could walk for miles without getting tired. Riding the trolley was for us a luxury. We rode “Trolley Number 11,” which is to say, we walked. We talked about whatever popped into our minds. Gina always headed for the cemetery—either the Jewish one near us or the Catholic one in Powazek; but best of all she liked the Russian Orthodox cemetery far down Leszno Street beyond Karcelak Place. Few Russians remained in Warsaw after Poland gained her independence apart from the Russian refugees, the impoverished “used-to-bes” who were nearly all drunks and slept at the “Circus,” an institution for the Gentile homeless. Former colonels, generals, and country squires wallowed in the gutters. Gentiles weren’t used to living in exile. When a Gentile lost his homeland, he became broken spiritually and physically.

  But the old Russian cemetery was fenced in, had expensive tombstones and old and thickly branched trees, and represented a symbol of the former Russian might. For some reason the Russians affixed photographs of the deceased to their tombstones. No one came here on the long summer days besides the birds. Gina didn’t tire of looking at the tombstones, reading the dates, studying the yellowed photographs. People had died young in the nineteenth century, and many young men and women struck down in their prime were buried here. Nearly all the women wore blouses with high collars, lace, and tall pompadours. A glow of health emanated from their faces and the lust for life characteristic of a ruling race. But they had been cut down in their forties, their thirties, some even in their twenties. Gina stopped before every tombstone and probed, reflected, reckoned. Flecks of sun shone down on her face from between the tree branches. After a while I, too, began to take an interest in the deceased. What had they died from? Had an ongoing epidemic reigned in Warsaw in those days? Had they committed suicide? Or had they died out of longing for Russia? The photographs had faded over the years, but the eyes had retained their animation. They smiled at some secret known only to themselves. It was hard to believe that these young ladies—each of whom knew sections of Pushkin or Lermontov by heart and whose faces expressed such an eagerness for life—were now nothing more than crumbled skeletons, dust. I became temporarily infatuated with these women and contemplated the pleasures they might have provided a man.

  Gina pointed to a photograph and said: “Isn’t she lovely? Pretty as a picture! Twenty-seven years is all she lived! A lieutenant’s wife. What did she die of, eh? He probably betrayed her with every soldier’s whore until she wasted away from jealousy. Or maybe he drank the nights away, and her blood became consumed by passion. Look at her, peaches and cream. You can see her firm breasts right through the blouse. You wouldn’t poison yourself on her, God forbid, if you lived in those times. Where is she now, eh? Can there be such a thing as a Russian paradise? What would Russians do in paradise?”

  “There’s no such thing as paradise.”

  “So you’re a heretic again, eh? Just yesterday you said that there is no death. Life is everywhere, even in a stone in the street.”

  “Yes, true, but she is not in paradise.”

  “Where, then, in Gehenna?”

  “In you, in me, a part of all the stars and planets.”

  “Words, my dear, mere words. Life is memory. If she doesn’t remember that she was Andrej Popov’s wife and that Grisha Ivanov inscribed love verses in her album and that she danced at a party with Boris Nikolaevich Saratov, then she is dead. The fact that flowers grow on her mound of earth doesn’t make her immortal.”

  “What would be so good if her soul remembered all the wrongs the lieutenant did her?”

  “Don’t twist my words! If my grandmother lives, all the grandmothers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers going back to Adam and even before live, too. They remember everything, but they’re so happy up in heaven they forgive all injustices. You yourself said that the souls in the other world love each other and bustle about. Those are your very words.”

  “That’s what the cabala says.”

  “It’s true. You’ll see it all with your own eyes. I’ll come to you from the other world and give myself to you. I’ll be with others, too, with all the men I’ve ever loved. Your religion of protest begins to displease me. I can accept the craziest notions, but not that God is a malefactor. This doesn’t make sense. He sends us down here to suffer a bit, then He rewards us many millions of times over. There are such pleasures awaiting us there that even fantasy cannot describe them. That time when I had the operation and later when I lay sick with the typhus I paid a visit up there above, and I heard such singing that no opera or symphony could compare to it. Angels sang and each note answered all the questions and filled me with a joy no words can convey. I yearned to stay there, but three patriarchs considered my case and judged that I go back to earth. Their faces emitted a kind of glow that simply doesn’t exist here. I began to cry before them, and they consoled and kissed me.”

  “In your sleep, eh?”

  “Awake, awake! There is no such thing as sleep. You don’t sleep—you make believe you’re sleeping. You don’t die, but make believe you’re dying. It’s all pretense. Just as I suffer and curse my lot, so do I know that it’s all nothing on top of nothing. What is suffering? Who is suffering? It’s all a kind of game.”

  “God has no right to make up such games.”

  “Well, all right, when you stand before Him you’ll tell Him so. Come, little colt, I’m hungry. I have some dried noodles and an onion at home, and there should be a bit of cocoa butter left. I’ll brown the onion and we’ll eat.”

  “You mean
we’ll pretend to eat just like the angels at Abraham’s.”

  “Yes, we’ll pretend and later we’ll pretend we’re tired and go to bed and pretend we’re terribly in love. What do you say to this philosophy?”

  “There is such a philosophy already. Its founder is a man named Vaihinger.”

  “Who is this Vaihinger? Everything exists already. Give me your mouth ….”

  Thirteen

  The government apparently kept an eye on me, for suddenly I received a notice to report for conscription. I knew precisely what this meant—spending two or three years among peasants, all kinds of toughs and wild characters, with no time for reading or writing, and each day putting up with countless insults—all that so a few years later I could give my life for the fatherland. But did a Jew have a fatherland? Some ten or eleven years earlier, my brother Joshua had received a similar demand to sacrifice his life for the Russian fatherland. In the interim Poland had become a part of Germany, and he was nearly drafted to serve the German fatherland. I must be frank here and say that even if Poland were a Jewish nation, I wouldn’t have had the slightest urge to be a soldier. For me, a barrack represented a much harsher punishment than prison. Running, jumping, marching, and shooting would be for me an unbearable torture and even worse would be to have to be among people. Just as others constantly required company, so did I require privacy. My whole world concept demanded isolation, the right and the privilege to stay away from others, and time to pursue my probings and nurture my creative appetites. From reading the leftist newspapers and from listening to the communists and their fellow travelers at the Writers’ Club I knew that leftism wanted to completely abolish privacy and to institute a perpetual public domain. They constantly spoke of the masses, but my nature demanded the freedom to be alone as long and as often as I wished. Going to cheder day after day was to me a burden, nor could I stand the yeshivahs. I doubt that I could have lasted long at a university. At times I envied the peasant with his little plot of ground. I could have been a tailor or shoemaker working in his own shop, but I couldn’t for the life of me work in a factory. It’s significant to add that despite my strong urge for love and sex, I had remained pathologically bashful.

  I resolved that if forced to serve, I would commit suicide first. In the interim I did what many other Jewish recruits had done before me during the Russian occupation—starved myself in order to lose weight and grow weak. I constantly wrangled with Gina. She brought me food even as I was trying to fast. I assumed that the fasting would weaken me sexually, but my libido (a new word that the Freudians had introduced into the daily language) grew stronger instead of weaker. I discovered at that time that the sexual urge is thoroughly bound up with spiritual strength rather than with physical. Love and sex were functions of the soul. The nights were filled with wild fantasies and with an inspiration that negated my pessimistic view of the world. Gina told me that sexual intercourse and particularly the climax evoked visions within her, and I never tired of questioning her about these visions.

  She responded: “I see faces, strange countenances.”

  As loquacious as she was regarding all other matters, she became taciturn when it came to these matters. But why? Did these visions frighten her? Did she lack the words to describe them? As for me, the fasts left me in such a state that the division between sleep and wakefulness just about disappeared. The moment I closed my eyes I promptly began to dream. I saw giants with heads reaching to the clouds. They wore clothes not of our time and perhaps not even of this world. They marched along in what seemed a kind of cosmic funeral procession and grunted a dirge rife with melancholy. Sometimes I saw swarms of dwarfs who sang, danced, and rejoiced in an unearthly rapture. These visions were so real, so magnificent, so richly detailed. True, they quickly faded from memory, but they left me perplexed and with the feeling that sleep erases all limitations of time, space, and causality. At times I dreamed of slaughters, massacres, pogroms, and awoke trembling, yet charged with renewed lust. Gina awoke at precisely the same split second, and we fell upon one another with a hunger that astounded us. What a remarkable mechanism was the brain! How extravagant it became the moment one closed his eyes! I often resolved to write down my dreams, yet at the same time I knew that this would be impossible. The moment I opened my eyes they burst like soap bubbles, immediately dissolved, and vanished. Nor did the words exist in my vocabulary to paint a true picture of a dream.

  Most philosophers spoke with contempt of human emotion; others ignored it altogether. Our holy books maintained that evil thoughts emanated from the evil spirit. The Literary Pages printed constant articles about Freud, who had begun to take dreams and emotions seriously, but his approach was rationalistic. He tried to analyze something that couldn’t be grasped, that lacked substance. He tried to make generalizations in an area thoroughly individualistic, one of unique occurrence, and thoroughly ambiguous. That which the cabalists attributed to God applied to a dream as well—no words could be found to describe it. The best you could do was to keep silent about it.

  Spring turned into summer and the heat waves commenced in Warsaw. The days stretched endlessly, the twilight lingered seemingly forever, and the sky stayed light until 10 P.M. I ate a spare supper. Gina played awhile with her table and tried to write automatically. I stood at the open window staring down at Gesia Street. The funerals kept on all day. Not far from here rested the old corpses and the new. Balmy breezes wafted up to my nostrils, and I kept thinking that they bore the stench of rot and decay, along with the secrets of birth and death. The street was dark and stars twinkled over the tin rooftops. At times it seemed to me that I could make out the white sash called the Milky Way. Everything was near—death, the universe, the enigma of dreams, the illusion of love and sex. Dogs barked, cats meowed. Gina’s apartment swarmed with moths, gnats, and beetles. Insects flew in through the open windows to make a final flutter before dying. Gina and I both sought to unite with the forces that guided the earth and to come to some kind of accounting and conclusions regarding the world, but these forces would have none of it. We were condemned to remain sunk forever in chaos.

  Although Gina didn’t conduct herself according to the laws of the Shulchan Aruch, she still mumbled her nightly prayers. I mentally begged God to save me from the barracks and at the same time prayed for those forced to stay there. So many dangers and problems lurked for everyone! A moment didn’t go by without some kind of trouble. People themselves caused one another grief. All the jails were jammed with criminals. At times I heard gunfire in the night, screams and blows, cries for help. The communists in Warsaw sought every means of fomenting a revolution and turning Poland over to the Bolsheviks. Hitler and his Nazis had already formulated plans to take back Upper Silesia and the “corridor” that the Versailles Treaty had stripped from Germany. Polish anti-Semites agitated against the Jews. The Jewish political parties wrangled among themselves. The Lithuanians yearned to seize Vilno. The Ruthenians and White Russians waged a struggle against Polish rule. Hobbes was right—everyone waged war against everyone else. Every peace was rife with new wars. The leaders themselves were at each other’s throats. I couldn’t live in this world—merely smuggle myself through life slithering like worms and mice, actually like all the creatures. Each day I got through was—and has remained to this day—a miracle. Jewish history in particular was one mighty travail of smuggling and sneaking through nations and laws that condemned us to death. Before going to sleep I took a last look at the starry sky. Was it this way up there, too? Was there an island of peace somewhere in the universe? …

  I went to bed, but Gina went on bustling a good deal longer. She washed the dishes, darned and washed her and my underwear. I lay there in the dark with my ears cocked. Maybe God would speak to me. Maybe my great-great-grandfather in the cemetery would tell me something. Maybe I would come up with something like a second Newtonian formula which would unravel the mystery of life. This revelation was likely to be much simpler than one might imagine. It mig
ht consist of one sentence. I even had a notion in what direction the formula would go—there was no death. The “I” was a thoroughgoing illusion. Sufferings were pleasures. Today, yesterday, and tomorrow were one and the same. I, Rothschild, the mouse in its hole, the bedbug on the wall, and the corpse in the grave were identical in every sense, as were dream and reality, male and female, thoughts and stones, feelings and atoms, love and hate. Well, but it wasn’t enough to say this—it had to be proven. Leibnitz couldn’t do it. Spinoza’s geometric method wasn’t convincing. This formula had to be written not in words and numbers but in some other medium that I would first have to invent. It was altogether possible that it had already been invented on some distant planet ….