Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  “No, Miss Stefa, don’t do that to your parents!”

  “Don’t play the saint with me. You’re not so holy yourself. All men without exception are the worst kind of egotists. They’d trample on corpses to gain their merest whim. Why would you want to do this? You can be frank with me.”

  “There is still the chance it might save me from the draft.”

  “No, not even the slightest chance. I told you you’d have to get papers, but so far you haven’t done a thing. Without documents you won’t get a passport. I offered to pay your expenses to go to your father’s town so that you could obtain an excerpt from the permanent population register, but you kept putting it off. Each time you made up a different excuse. The starosta here in Warsaw is in no hurry to issue passports to someone like you who is due for conscription. Especially a discounted passport. Everything proceeds at a snail’s pace with these bureaucrats. Don’t interrupt me. Somehow, you’re just like Mark. You’re completely lacking in will. A portion of your brain is paralyzed. You told me about a woman who is twice your age. What is there between you two? Are you in love with her? Is it that you can’t bear to leave her? If that’s the case, why are you wasting my time? One charlatan is enough—I don’t need two. Give me an honest answer.”

  “If I’m conscripted, I’d have to leave her anyhow. She is sick besides.”

  “What’s wrong with her? Well, it’s all the same. You won’t be conscripted and even if you are, you’ll soon be discharged. You can as much be a soldier as I can be a rabbi. I’ll give you a thousand zlotys to marry me, then after my bastard is born you can divorce me.”

  “I won’t take any money from you.”

  “What is it with you—a sort of philanthropy?”

  “I want to do it for you.”

  “The situation is such that I can’t be in Warsaw when the child comes. I’ll have to go away somewhere and I’ll let them know about the child a few months later so that they can nurse the illusion that everything is in order. God cursed the female gender. He is an even greater antifeminist than Otto Weininger and Strindberg. You don’t look like an actor, but you must try to play the role that the fiction has become a reality for you. I’ll tell you something: After you came here the first time, my father said: “This young man appeals to me more than that rogue Mark. I wish you were marrying him for real.’ I laughed at the time but fate has a way of playing funny tricks. Are you ready to go away with me for a few weeks? We have to arrange it so that the farce is carried through one hundred per cent.”

  “I hope I can get leave from the magazine.”

  “Eh? You must know that you’d be saving the lives of my parents. True, not for long, but it’s a mitzva anyhow. As you see I know the word mitzva. I’m not a complete ignoramus. I’m in such a spot now that anything can happen. You’re yet liable to become a widower a day or a week after the wedding. I want to ask you something, but answer me truthfully. Do you love anyone? Did you ever love anyone? What about that woman who could be your mother—do you love her?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “What buts are there? Where you love there are no buts.”

  “The but is that I can love someone else too.”

  “Get him—a yeshivah boy and he talks like a regular Don Juan. How many lovers have you had so far?”

  “Only the one, Gina.”

  “At least you’re honest, or so it would seem. Mark was a liar, a dreadful liar, a pathological liar. All the while he was writing me those burning love letters—they sizzled between my fingers—he was selling himself to some snob from England, probably a spinster that no one else wanted. If people can be such liars then life isn’t worth a fig. You told me you were interested in writing and all that. Why are people such liars? What’s the reason for it?”

  “The reason is that laws are formed that are lies from the very start. Your Mark might have loved you and six other women at the same time. He couldn’t sign a contract to love you all your life. He obviously had others all the while. I only wonder why you can’t understand this.”

  “I do understand it, I understand, all right. I can understand everything—every thief, every murderer, every degenerate. But I can only love one person. From the day I met him I loved only him, thought only of him, and all my dreams were of him only.”

  “It’s not his fault that his nature is different from yours.”

  “No, it’s not his fault. You don’t know what love is, that’s why it’s easy for you to defend him. Why you would want to play out this farce is something I can’t understand either, but when one is drowning, he’ll clutch at any straw and to me you are that straw. Go to my father and tell him you want to marry me. We won’t do it here in Warsaw. We’ll go somewhere else. We have relatives here and people who consider themselves our friends and I can’t play out this comedy in front of a whole crew. You say you have a brother here. Someone told me he’s a very talented writer.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “You’ll have to keep this a secret from him. From your parents too. We’ll go to Danzig and hold the ceremony there. The next day you’ll come back to Warsaw as if nothing had happened. I’ll stay there, as the saying goes, to drain the bitter cup. Only one hope is left to me—that I die in labor and he, my son, dies with me. You still believe in God?”

  “Yes, I still do.”

  “If He exists, then He is a comedian. This whole world is one big joke. Has any philosopher or theologian yet described God as a comedian?”

  “It says in the Scriptures: ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.’ ”

  “Everything is in the Bible and if it’s not in the Bible, it’s in Shakespeare. Go in to my father. I have to laugh too.”

  And Stefa erupted in a laugh, then her face grew quickly grim.

  4

  I had asked for a leave of absence from the magazine and it had been granted at once. I promptly regretted having done so for the editor’s tone seemed to imply that the magazine could get along without a proofreader. To begin with, I overlooked many errors. Secondly, the editor and the writers could read their own proofs. The readers in the provinces could no longer afford to pay for their subscriptions and the postcards dispatched to dun them cost more than what they owed. A dreadful poverty reigned over the villages. The young people all strove to go abroad but the consulates of all the nations seemed to have conspired to grant no more visas to Jews. It was easier for Polish peasants to obtain them. There was a need abroad for coal miners, farm workers, heavy laborers, not for study-house striplings who took to commerce or tried to enter the universities. Besides, many of the young Jews were infected with Marxism and communism and they instigated the local workers to strike. A number of leftist-oriented Jewish youth had smuggled themselves into Soviet Russia, but rumors spread that they had been imprisoned or sent to slave camps in Siberia. In any case, they were never heard from again. The Trotsky opposition had already emerged in Russia and the Party and the population were being purged of deviators, both left and right. A number of Trotskyites who had fled the Soviet Union to Poland told tales of horror. All the prisons were jammed with political prisoners, people were dragged from their beds in the nights. Hundreds of thousands of kulaks and plain peasants had been exiled en masse to Siberia. At the Writers’ Club, Isaac Deutscher, the editor of a Yiddish Stalinist magazine, was suddenly transformed into a Trotskyite and published an attack against Stalin. The Stalinists at the Club labeled him a fascist, an enemy of the proletariat, a counterrevolutionary, and an imperialist lackey.

  I knew this Isaac Deutscher and often had heated debates with him. He had called me the very same names with which he was now being assailed. He told me with brutal frankness that on the day of the revolution there could be no neutrals. Whoever didn’t line up on the side of the masses would be treated as an enemy of the people. He, Isaac, was an expert on Marxist literature, a 100 percent materialist. Compared to me, he was wealthy and worldly. He had a well-paying job on the Jewish-Polish p
aper Nasz Przeglad. He came from Cracow and spoke an excellent Polish. Nor did he tremble at the thought of the draft as I did. When his time came, he went off and soon earned corporal’s stripes even though—as I suspected it—he disseminated the Communist propaganda among the soldiers.

  To return to Stefa. It happened like this. That day Stefa asked me to go in to her father and ask for his daughter’s hand, Isidore Janovsky had gone off somewhere, I believe to his expartner who had been bankrupted along with him. I was supposed to phone Stefa the next day but when I rang, no one answered. I called again and again and it turned out that there was no one at home, not even the maid. This seemed to me puzzling. Mrs. Janovsky, a sick woman, hardly ever left the house. Had some tragedy occurred? Had Stefa tried to commit suicide? I went there and knocked on the door but no one came. Another day went by and still no one answered the phone. I had taken leave from the magazine and had risked losing my job because of this phony marriage, but my bride had vanished along with my prospective in-laws.

  I stayed awake nights trying to arrive at some solution of the puzzle but I knew that no brain can foresee the surprises life can invent. Almost a week went by and still no one came to the door or answered the phone. I sought out the janitor and asked him what had happened.

  He said: “Seems they went away somewhere.”

  “All of them?”

  “Seems so.”

  And he turned abruptly away from me to talk to the mailman who had brought a registered letter. The janitor appeared to me to be acting in a suspicious manner and I harked back to the volumes of Sherlock Holmes and Max Spitzkopf I had read as a boy. I took a walk down the street. I had sought suspense, and fate had provided it to me. Stefa had spoken about murdering her parents and then killing herself and in my imagination I pictured the family lying in a puddle of blood.

  Stefa had marked down my address in her notebook and the suspicion of the crime was yet liable to fall on me. The police might somehow discover that I had been planning to marry her. I pictured myself in the courtroom as the prosecutor described my depraved character. I had lived with a woman twice my age, I had tried to get out of serving my country, I was about to marry fictitiously the murdered Stefa. My writings were brought into court and the prosecutor showed them to be rife with sadism, eroticism, demonology. One of the witnesses for the prosecution was Sabina. She admitted in court that I had made love to her. The prosecutor asked her:

  “Is it true that your cousin who lived with you was a Soviet spy?”

  “Yes, it’s true.”

  And I was condemned to death.

  The day was warm and Leszno Street was crowded with pedestrians, mostly women. At the Writers’ Club I had often heard women speak about spring fever. They all agreed that spring in Warsaw could make one crazy with longing. Today was just such a day. The air smelled of lilac blossoms, cool breezes from the Vistula, and the Praga woods. The scents of the fields and orchards lying around Warsaw blended with the odors of newly baked bread, rolls, and bagels, roasted coffee, and milk fresh from the udder. The sky loomed clear and perfectly cloudless above the rooftops and although it was still early in the day, it reflected the deep night-blue of those climates where the sun doesn’t set during the summer months. The women, looking elegant in their new dresses and hats, carried bunches of flowers and parcels bound in colored ribbon. They stretched in swarms, just as during Rosh Hashanah when they gather at the stream to cast their sins upon the waters. I looked each one over and they looked back with frivolous glances and something like silent consent.

  Suddenly, I saw Isidore Janovsky approaching in a long black coat and matching derby. He took mincing steps and leaned on his cane. He apparently didn’t recognize me since he looked straight at me without a change of expression.

  I stopped him and he seemed to come awake. I said: “Mr. Janovsky, how are you?”

  He hesitated a long while, then said: “I know you. You’re the young man with the certificate.”

  “Yes, right.”

  Isidore Janovsky wavered again. “Stefa no longer needs a certificate.”

  “May I ask why not?”

  “Stefa is getting married this week.”

  I felt myself blush. I wanted to ask to whom, but all I said was:

  “Well, congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  And Janovsky placed his cane a step forward.

  I got out of his way and he went past me, the father of a bride and proud in-law-to-be. I stood there and stared after him. Then I headed for the Writers’ Club.

  Five

  1

  Fate played with me and I played along. I could see clearly that it was leading me to disaster but I told myself that I was ready for this. Everyone lost to it anyhow. The mystery regarding Stefa had been cleared up. She had married Leon Treitler, a wealthy man, a father of two married daughters, a landlord, a partner in a textile factory in Lodz. Leon Treitler owned a villa in Michalin, a resort on the Otwock line, and all the while I had been trying to reach Stefa, the whole family had been visiting there. Soon after the wedding the couple left on a trip around the world. They were scheduled to return only after the Days of Awe. How this change had suddenly occurred was something I could not fathom. Did Treitler know that she was carrying another man’s child and had forgiven her? Or had she tried to deceive him?

  None of this had anything to do with me now. The Palestine Bureau had withdrawn my certificate and it appeared that I was fated either to serve in the army or commit suicide. I lived in a state of suspension. I both played with fate and at the same time observed the game, or kibitzed, as they called it at the Writers’ Club.

  Following my leave of absence I was given my proofreader’s job back but both the magazine and the publishing house that backed it hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. The authors had rebelled against me and issued an ultimatum that if I overlooked any more errors they wouldn’t contribute any more articles. They accused me of spite and indifference. I promised fervently and even took a solemn oath to be more careful, but things deteriorated from week to week. I read without knowing what I was reading. If I made an effort and managed to grasp their meaning, the writings seemed to me trivial and false. The reviewers would praise a book but I couldn’t figure out why. When they condemned one, the condemnation seemed without basis too, often rife with personal antagonism. The poetry was full of rhetoric and banality. Many poets only strove to please the Communist party leaders and their cultural activists, who no matter how much they were fawned upon could never be appeased. The stories struck me as boring and written in one vein. Although the number of industrial workers among Jews in Poland was comparatively small—most Polish Jews being merchants, brokers, cheder teachers, and employed in various handicrafts—the authors kept writing about Jewish factory workers and even peasants, a species that hardly existed.

  Correcting this trash became for me a physical torment. I suffered headaches from reading and sometimes the lines began to leapfrog over one another or turn green, gold, or fiery and I feared going blind. Everything with me proceeded awkwardly and I clearly saw that this state of affairs was no mere aggregation of accidents but part of a somber design.

  Gina began to ail and hint that her months or weeks were numbered. I begged her to see a doctor but she found a new excuse not to each time. I watched with alarm as she grew thinner, weaker, unable to eat. Her sexual urges had dissipated and were replaced by a kind of maternal or sisterly affection toward me. She began to act modest around me and wouldn’t let me see her naked. She’d lie in bed with me and not utter a word. Lying beside her, I lost my power of speech too. Although I had never mentioned a word to her about Stefa, I had the suspicion that she somehow knew about her and bore me a grudge. But how could she have learned about it? Unless her late grandmother had told her.

  Spring had passed and the heat waves started. My brother Joshua had gone to Svider for the summer along with his wife and children, Yasha and Josele, or Joziek, as his mother
called him. My brother had rented a villa from the Yiddish writer Alter Kacyzna. Other Yiddish writers and journalists were also vacationing in the area. From earliest childhood I had felt a powerful desire to be with my brother. Now that I had begun to write I was anxious to show him my work and consult with him. My brother was more than willing to help me but I was ashamed to face him both on account of my dealings with women and because of my writing.

  I also knew that my brother couldn’t agree with my world outlook. He was far from an optimist but he wasn’t as pessimistic as I. He had a wife and children. Like many other liberals he hoped that despite all its insanities, mankind would move forward not backward. But I spoke like a nihilist and a suicide and more than once I evoked his anger.

  He had invited me to spend the whole summer with him in Svider but I couldn’t mix with the writers, nor did I want to cause him embarrassment with my pessimism. I knew that the writers’ wives whispered about me and slandered me among themselves. Such were the contradictions within my character that I could neither be alone nor stand others or manage to keep perfect secrets about my conduct. I waged a kind of personal conspiracy. In a sense, I practiced my theory that one could not proceed in a straight, direct fashion through the world but had to constantly smuggle himself through, or muddle through.

  Around that time I had written a story called “In the World of Chaos.” Its hero was nothing less than a corpse who didn’t know that he was dead. He wandered across Poland, attended fairs, called on rabbis, even allowed himself to be proposed for marriage. He could not understand himself nor did others understand him until he came to a rabbi, a cabalist who resolved his mystery for him—namely, that he was dead and must lie in his grave rather than make a fool of himself with the ambitions of the living. The story ended with the rabbi telling him: “Unbutton your gaberdine and you’ll see that you’re wearing shrouds.”