Love and Exile

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Esther and I now lay on the bed and from time to time I glanced at my watch. I didn’t dare miss my train to Otwock! I felt guilty, but I had the consolation that I wasn’t deceiving Esther. We both tried to steal something which belonged to us only. Esther’s face was flushed nevertheless. She told me that she would never forget me and that if she was spared she would come to me in America. I had noticed that Esther too glanced at her wristwatch. Tsipele would be returning shortly.

  We said good-bye, kissed at length, and arranged a rendezvous for the coming week when I would absolutely, positively have more time for her. When we were at the door, Esther mumbled, “I hope you were careful.”

  “Yes, a hundred percent!”

  The gaslight illuminating the stairs was out, which meant that the gate was already closed. I had descended half a flight when I heard Esther’s voice. She called to me to come back. It turned out that in my excitement the roll of bills—all the money I had collected today at the bank and at the HIAS office—had fallen out of my breast pocket.

  I seized it and stuck it back in my pocket. “I’m crazy, crazy as a loon!”

  I started racing down the stairs in the dark. I had lost some two to three minutes. I would have to wait until the janitor opened the gate for me. I began to search for the bell with which to rouse him. I couldn’t find it. I tapped around like a blind man. Luckily, someone rang the bell on the outside. The janitor was in no hurry to open up, and only after a long wait did he come out of his cubicle, grumbling, as did all janitors I have ever met. I groped in my pocket for a coin with which to tip him, but I couldn’t find one. I was almost sure that I had had coins in both pockets of my jacket. I must have dropped them at Esther’s. The janitor paused and stretched out a hand for my coin, and when I began to apologize, he spat and cursed. I heard him say “Psia krew”—dog’s blood. He opened the gate with a large key and by the light of the streetlamp I saw Tsipele.

  “Moreh!”

  She made a move as if to embrace me, but I only managed to say “Good night!” I hadn’t a moment to lose now. I ran in the direction of Nalewki Street. I had to catch either a streetcar, a droshky, or a taxi—whichever came first. One taxi passed after another—they were all heading away from the depot, not toward it. The streetcars also ran in the opposite direction. All I could do was run. It was eight minutes to twelve by the time I got to the Gdansk Station. Thank God there was no line in front of the ticket seller’s cage and I quickly bought my ticket. This wasn’t a local train running only between Warsaw and Otwock, but one that ran as far as Lvov. The cars were crowded with passengers, mostly Jewish salesmen and storekeepers from the provinces. Almost every one carried sacks, bundles, or crates of goods. Several coaches were full of soldiers. No civilian passengers were allowed in there. The soliders stood by the open windows and mocked the harassed Jews racing from car to car and dragging their bundles. The second-class cars were occupied mainly by officers.

  I squeezed myself into one of the third-class cars as best I could. All the seats were taken. Some passengers read Yiddish newspapers, some chewed unfinished suppers from paper bags, others leaned their heads against the walls trying to catch some sleep. All the faces reflected the fatigue of the Diaspora, the fear of tomorrow. The train was scheduled to depart at midnight, but the clock showed a quarter past twelve and we still hadn’t moved. The car smelled of cigarette smoke, garlic, onions, sweat, and the latrine. Facing me stood a girl with a gold, or gold-plated, Star of David hanging around her neck. She was trying to read a novel by the Polish sex novelist Gabriela Zapolska in the murky light of the gas lamp. Just as I, she had accepted the kind of secular Jewishness that defies all definitions.

  This time, the trip from Warsaw to Otwock took not an hour but only half that time. The train stopped there for just a minute and discharged a few passengers. I started off across the sandy path leading to the broken-down villa where Lena waited for me. I had brought her neither food nor travel books, but I had resolved that first thing in the morning I would go to Slavin’s Bookstore and buy her a book and take her to a restaurant.

  Otwock, with all its consumptives, was asleep. Inside the sanatoriums’ morgues lay those who earlier that day had breathed their last. I climbed the dark stairs of the house we lived in and every board squeaked beneath my heavy shoes. I opened the door to our room. Our bed stood empty. I called, “Lena! Lena!” and an echo answered. I opened the door to the balcony even though I could see through the glass door that no one was there. I began searching for matches, but I didn’t find them. It was Lena who smoked, not I, and she had probably taken them with her. After a while my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and I began to see by the light of the stars and that of a distant streetlight. Lena had taken her coat and her satchel. She hadn’t left a note.

  I went out onto the balcony and stood there for a long time contemplating the heavenly bodies. I asked them mutely, “What do you say to all this?” And I imagined that they replied, “We have seen it all before.”

  Two

  1

  Everything came hard to me—the passport, the visa. Even a naïve Yankee like the American consul didn’t believe that I was being invited to America to speak about literature. I looked like a frightened boy, not a lecturer. He posed many questions to me through his interpreter, a Jewish girl with a big head of bleached curly hair. The consul had received information from someone that I was having an affair with a leftist woman and he asked, “How is it you come to be involved with such individuals?”

  I was overcome by a silly sense of frankness and I countered his question with another: “Where else can you get free love?”

  The interpreter laughed, and after she had translated my response, laughter broke out among the other officials.

  This answer, like all my others, was not true. Many of the so-called bourgeois girls were already far from being chaste. The only difference lay in that the bourgeois girls weren’t interested in some Yiddish scribbler who was a pauper besides. They sought doctors, lawyers, or wealthy merchants. They demanded to be taken to the theater, to cafes. Neither was I interested in their banalities. With Lena at least I could have discussions, dash her hopes for a better world. To her I was a cynic, not a schlemiel.

  After a long interrogation, and shaking his head dolefully, the consul affixed the stamp designating a tourist visa in my passport. He shrugged his shoulders and wished me a happy journey. Oddly, all the lies I told the consul that day came true years later. How does Spinoza put it in his Ethics: There are no lies, only crippled truths. I might add, The truer a truth is, the more crippled it appears to us.

  Of course I felt exalted that I had been granted, one might say, the privilege of life, a reprieve from Hitler’s executioners. Yet, at the same time, I thought, This is man. His life and death depend on a piece of paper, a signature, the whim of another, be he consul, starosta, judge, or commissar. When I left the consul’s office, I passed a hallway where many others like me were waiting. Their eyes seemed to ask, Did he get his visa or was he refused it? And what will be my fate? On that pre-spring day I felt more than ever the dependence of man, his helplessness. I envied the cobblestones in the streets, which needed no passports, no visas, no novels, no favors. It wasn’t I that was alive and they that were dead, I told myself. Quite the contrary. The stones lived and I was dead.

  From time to time I fingered the passport in my breast pocket. Had all this really happened? And what had I done to deserve this? Again and again I stopped at shop windows and leafed through the passport. It was valid for a period of six months, as was the visa. After that I would have to apply for an extension at the Polish consulate in New York and to the Immigration Service in Washington. Even if it became possible to obtain a permanent visa outside of the quota, I couldn’t obtain it in America. According to law, I’d have to go outside the country to apply for this visa—to Canada or Cuba, for instance. But to do that required another visa ….

  Several years before, when I had
been exempted from military service, it was Gina who had been waiting for me to hear the news. But Gina no longer lived. Lena had vanished. As for Stefa, my visa to America was hardly good news. She told me this at every opportunity. Nor would my cousin Esther be pleased that I’d be leaving.

  Although M. G. Haggai had asked me to move out that summer day, I still lived there. He had changed his mind. I had convinced him that I had committed no sin in his house. He enjoyed chatting with me about literature and about the fact that most Hebrew writers didn’t know their grammar. They made errors in their texts and the critics knew even less than they did. Haggai often told me that in order to know Hebrew properly one had to devote one’s whole life to it, and sometimes it appeared that even one life wasn’t enough.

  I telephoned Stefa now. She wasn’t home. Esther had a job at a milliners with a store and workshop on Zabia Street and she wasn’t due home till evening. I went to have lunch at the Writers’ Club and possibly to try to telephone Stefa again. The Writers’ Club wasn’t yet twenty years old but I had the feeling that it had existed forever. A number of the writers had grown old; many had died; a few had grown senile. Everyone who belonged to the club had endless complaints against the world, against God, against other writers, editors, reviewers, even against the readers and their bad taste.

  I had the urge to show off my visa to somebody, but I decided against it. The telephone rang and the woman at the hatcheck counter came to fetch me. It was Stefa. I told her the news and she exclaimed, “Come right over!”

  I went out into the street and raced toward Niecala Street. Warsaw suddenly appeared to me a foreign city. I barely recognized the stores, the buildings, the tramways. I recalled something out of the Gemara: “That which is about to be burned is like already burned.” I paraphrased it in my mind: That which one is preparing to abandon is like already abandoned.

  As usual before spring, cold winds blended with warm breezes. One tree in the Saxony Gardens bloomed all by itself amidst the other bare trees and bushes. A few days before I had seen a blossom fall along with snow while a butterfly fluttered amidst it all. I wanted to leave the city, yet at the same time I already longed for this city where I hadn’t properly settled but had merely sampled a meager portion of its allures. I now compared Warsaw to a book one must lay aside just as the story is approaching its climax. I rang Stefa’s doorbell and she came to answer. While still in the doorway, she said, “I should congratulate you, but it’s all happening faster than I can digest it.”

  “Why did you happen to phone to the club today?” I asked.

  “Oh, my cursed intuition. Last night, Leon said, ‘You’ll see. Your lover will go away and not even write to you.’ ”

  “Is that what he called me?”

  “Yes, he knows everything. Sometimes he speaks of you as if he knows nothing, then suddenly he sounds as if he knows it all. Actually I wanted to ring you at Haggai’s, only I made a mistake and dialed the Writers’ Club instead. Come, show me the visa. We’ll have to make a party, or whatever. Before you even began talking about America I knew that you would do the same as Mark—leave me. In New York someone already waits who doesn’t even know of your existence. But she’ll take you in her arms and you’ll be hers. That’s how destiny works. One thing I want to assure you, I’ll never depend upon anyone again.”

  “Stefa, you promised to tell me the truth.” I heard my lips form the words. I knew that Stefa knew what I meant. That day when she phoned me at Mrs. Alpert’s and I asked if she had had a boy or a girl, she told me that she had had nothing, and her answer remained the same thereafter. I could never determine from her if she had had the child or a late abortion, or possibly had given birth to a stillborn infant. Each time I returned to this subject, Stefa offered the same response with the resolution of one who has determined to take a secret along to the grave. I wasn’t all that concerned. The child, if it existed at all, was Mark’s not mine. One of the womanizers at the Writers’ Club had once given me a list of symptoms by which to determine if a woman had ever given birth. Later, a gynecologist I had met on vacation told me that all these alleged signs were pure nonsense.

  I was ashamed of my curiosity and tried somehow to justify it, but Stefa gave me no opportunity to do so. She seized my wrist, cast a solemn look at me, and said, “I have a daughter!”

  I had the feeling that the words had been torn from her mouth.

  “Where is she?”

  “In Gdansk.”

  Stefa didn’t let go of my hand but squeezed it forcefully, as if waiting for me to ask more.

  “Leon knows?”

  “Yes, he knows. He pays for her. He even wanted to bring her to Warsaw, but I didn’t want our families to have something to gossip about forever. My father is alive and I don’t want to cause him grief. He will never know that he has a grandchild. Mark’s mother died without this satisfaction. Nor does Mark know that he’s a father. I’ve wanted to speak to you about this on many occasions, but somehow I always postponed it. The Nazis are on the verge of seizing Gdansk and the whole Corridor. I don’t want my child to fall into the hands of those murderers.”

  “If they seize Gdansk, they can seize Warsaw too,” I said, not sure whether I should say this and for what purpose.

  “Yes, true, but Leon is an optimist—so deeply involved in his business that he is blind to all other matters. He keeps predicting that it will never come to war. In his own fashion, Leon is a good person. If only I could love him—but something about him repels me. The worst of it is that I absolutely cannot understand him. His whole way of thinking and all his emotions are those of someone who has come down from another planet. His whole being is focused on money, yet he gets little pleasure from all his earnings. He loves me, but in a way as if I were a bargain he had caught at some bazaar.”

  “If he loves you, convince him to get your daughter and take you both to America.”

  “That he wouldn’t do. He’s even afraid to go to the country for the summer. When he took that trip around the world with me, he claimed to have lost half of his fortune because of it. He remains in the city during the worst heat waves. It’s gotten so I myself don’t want to go anywhere anymore. Not with him. When he’s away from Warsaw and his business, he becomes completely mad.”

  “Why don’t you have a child together?”

  “Oh, I don’t want his child. I don’t want any more children. What for? I shouldn’t say this, but the older Franka gets—I named my daughter after my dead aunt—the more she resembles Mark. The German woman who is bringing her up keeps sending photographs, and her resemblance to him is uncanny. If I were raising her myself perhaps I might not notice this so clearly, but when I receive the photos I see things a mother shouldn’t see. I still hope to God that she won’t have his character. Oh, you shouldn’t have asked me about it, then I wouldn’t have had to say these bitter words. My love for Mark has changed into revulsion. Once I found a photograph of him among my papers and when I looked at it I literally threw up.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to know. You are, in a sense, the witness to my fiasco—to all my fiascoes. Because he was so passionately assimilated, I grew closer to Jewishness, but I can’t stand the Jews either. The whole species of man is revolting to me. I ask no favor of God, but I would like my father to die in his sleep. That’s an easy death. Then I would put an end to the whole rottenness.”

  Three

  1

  I had packed my clothes and my manuscripts into the two valises that I took with me to America. I said good-bye to Aaron Zeitlin, to J. J. Trunk, and to a few others. The Jewish section of the PEN Club was issuing my first book in Yiddish, Satan in Goray, but copies weren’t yet ready for me to take along.

  Stefa, Leon Treitler, and my cousin Esther came to see me off at the railroad station. They had wanted to make a farewell party for me at the Writers’ Club, but I demurred. I had observed many such parties. The writers ate, drank tea, and ma
de long and often inane speeches about the guest of honor. The wags made quiet fun of the speakers and of their silly praises. I had occasionally been one of those wags and more than once I had heard some hack being praised in superlatives. The speakers often justified this by claiming that they had done it out of compassion for a neglected writer, a foreign visitor, or whoever he might have been. I wasn’t anxious to be a part of this sort of literary philanthropy. I was already close to thirty and all I had accomplished in Yiddish literature was one novella and several short stories that I had published in magazines and anthologies no one read. I had seen writers, actors, and other creative people literally arrange banquets and jubilees in their own behalf. Long before they reached the age of fifty, they began mentioning the date of their birth, or the date of their first publication, or appearing on the stage, hinting and grumbling about the lack of public appreciation. Invariably, a group of friends evolved who did recognize and did remember. Sometimes a “surprise” banquet was then arranged for the forgotten hero, who wrote the invitations himself. I recall one time when they tried to enlist J. J. Trunk in such a masquerade, but he had enough sense to decline. “It’s not that I dislike honor,” he told me, “but I refuse shame.”

  In a way, the last few weeks prior to my departure were to me like a long holiday. People were friendlier to me than ever, often sentimental, as if sensing that we would never see each other again. Women with whom I had conducted semi-, quarter-, or might-have-been affairs suddenly determined that this was the time for us to go further or all the way.

  In those days, a trip to America was still considered an adventure. True, Lindbergh had already flown the Atlantic, but passenger service to America was still by sea. My biggest concern was that as a single passenger I would have to share a cabin with another man. My need for privacy was so strong that I was ready to spend my last groschen for a private cabin. The fact is that even my last groschen wouldn’t have helped. I confided my predicament to my travel agent and he was astounded that I should be perturbed about such a trifle.