She’d been in the provincial capital and for a few days had dragged herself about with a tall, wealthy young man named Shmulik Zaydenovski; the whole shtetl knew about this by now—and nothing would come of it.
Having grown bored with standing outdoors, she went back into the house, lay down on the bed in her room, and thought coldly and indifferently about this young bachelor:
He was a tall young man in a high-crowned beaver hat and a new skunk fur overcoat* who ought to be married, and had a youthful father with business interests worth half a million. Strolling about the bustling streets of the provincial capital, he’d stopped on meeting his former Hebrew teacher and told him quietly and with sham earnestness how greatly he admired the work of some Yiddish writer or other and how good the big-city cantors were:
—Both he and the Hebrew teacher had melodious voices and had once accompanied cantors together.
Rich Jews, merchants who’d once known his father, looked at him from the opposite side of the pavement in front of the stock exchange, forgot their business affairs for a moment, reflected on the enormous dowries they’d bestow on their grown-up daughters, and spoke about Shmulik, and about his father whom they’d known long before:
—A very fine young man, this Shmulik Zaydenovski, they say.
But Shmulik himself had made the acquaintance of Mirel Hurvits, and would hear no word about other matches.
And why did she please this rich young bachelor so greatly?
He was now undoubtedly gliding swiftly onward somewhere far, far away, toward the quiet end of a suburb in the distant provincial capital, gliding swiftly onward by himself in his very own sleigh which had been sent out to meet him at the train, longing for Mirel, and thinking about what his parents would soon inquisitively begin demanding of him:
—How do you like Mirel Hurvits?
—And all in all, was she beautiful, this Mirel Hurvits?
She thought long about him, and about many other young men whom she knew, remembered the distant village and Tarabay’s house there, where as a child she’d sought shelter from a summer storm with her father, and thought of Tarabay’s son, the polytechnic student, and of his friend, their guest. Suddenly she paled in agitation, and with her heart pounding rapidly, she recalled Nosn Heler, that charming young bachelor with the fresh, oblong face and the barely visible whiskers who’d completed his studies at the science-oriented school and had twice failed the university entrance examination. A year before, solely on her account, he’d spent the entire spring here in the shtetl, awakening romantic longings in young women to whom he’d never addressed a single word.
During the quiet spring evenings she’d sat with him on the steep hill outside the town center, leaning her head against his shoulder, and listening sadly to him repeating the same thing he’d said the day before and the day before that:
—If she’d break off her engagement to her fiancé Velvl Burnes, he’d complete his studies at the polytechnic, become an engineer in a distant factory, and live with Mirel in an ivy-covered cottage there.
But once, in the late twilight of a spring evening, Mirel vividly pictured herself two years after her marriage to Heler, totally alone, having finished her late afternoon tea, lying on a sofa in that ivy-covered cottage near a factory and thinking indifferently and without the slightest desire in her heart:
—He … Nosn … he’d come home to bed from the factory so often on previous occasions … He’ll definitely come home tonight as well.
And during that same twilight she searched all over the shtetl for Heler, eventually found him, and told him:
—Nothing would come of this, so Heler … Heler could leave the shtetl that very day.
After that, Heler had spent the whole summer with an uncle in the sugar refinery, had strolled all over the village with Nokhem Tarabay’s children, and wanting to take his revenge on Mirel, had gone round saying:
—He certainly wasn’t the first with whom Mirel had exchanged kisses.
Tarabay’s wife and daughter soon got to hear of this, and over in the shtetl someone broadcast it all over the neighborhood.
One Saturday night, not far from the midwife Schatz’s cottage, she encountered three apprentice tailors out for a stroll, made way for them, and heard them making ugly jokes in coarse language about her and Nosn Heler.
—He’s a fool—one of them commented about her new fiancé.—He doesn’t understand that it’s better to have one percent in a good business than a full hundred percent in a bad one.
The day after that, when it was overcast and chilly outdoors and she was on her way to the provincial capital with her fiancé for no reason but to spite someone, she instructed the driver to make a detour to the village where the sugar refinery stood and where Nosn Heler was still idling away his time and, again to spite someone, she stopped in front of Nokhem Tarabay’s house and sent the driver in to borrow a felt coat for Velvl:
—They’d left home so lightly clothed—she instructed the driver to say—that she was afraid Velvl might catch a chill, God forbid.
Subsequently she dreamed all night about Nokhem Tarabay’s house in the village and his family’s out-of-town guest, the polytechnic student, about whom their neighbor, the Jew who’d come down in the world, had told her the day before. Somewhere in the pale darkness she was climbing the bare hill outside the town with this student, smiling at him, and hearing him say:
—She, Mirel, had once had a fiancé; he’d seen him here. What a fool of a fiancé she’d once had!
When she awoke, she couldn’t remember what he looked like, this visiting polytechnic student. She dozed off again with a vaguely troubling yearning in her heart and her hands pressed to her breast, started awake once more with the remembrance of another vague dream in which this polytechnic student closely resembled Nosn Heler, and was unable to tell for which of them her heart longed.
Later, on a beautiful day of freshly fallen snow when, to honor the Gentile festival, the sun had triumphed over the frost, moisture started trickling drop by drop from the blank white roofs and intensified the heart’s longing. With red sashes round their long white fur coats, the Gentile village girls stood around in the marketplace merrily cracking sunflower seeds and laughing at the village lads who were staging mock fights for their benefit. There, in front of the town’s only grocery store at the entrance to the marketplace, Tarabay’s elegantly decorated sleigh stood waiting for his children who were greedily consuming all the chocolate in the shop.
A housewife coming out into the marketplace from inside the store carrying a sack of flour pressed to her belly stopped not far from Reb Gedalye’s house to remark:
—They’re such handsome boys, Tarabay’s children, and his daughter, too … The daughter’s very attractive as well.
Returning to the house with a large bottle of kerosene, the maid also paused next to Mirel on the steps of the verandah to report what she’d seen and heard in the shop.
—Their guest, the polytechnic student, had told the shopkeeper: “In your shtetl there’s a barishniya* named Mirel Hurvits who loves milk chocolate, so for her sake you must stock chocolate.”
The maid went indoors and soon forgot what she’d seen and heard. But Mirel remained standing on the steps of the verandah for a long time, unable to tear her gaze away from the store and the elegantly decorated sleigh in front of it. At length Tarabay’s children emerged, paused to view the shtetl, and took great pleasure in the antics of the schoolboy from the scientific-oriented school who’d caught a kid in the middle of the marketplace. He twisted the animal’s tail, demanding to know how the letters M and E written together were pronounced, and thus forced the kid to respond with a bleating cry of pain:
—Me-eh-eh-eh … me-eh-eh-eh …
Eventually they seated themselves in their vehicle and, setting off for home past Reb Gedalye’s house, all of them, except the girl, stared at Mirel. Tarabay’s son murmured something in the ear of his polytechnic student friend, who had
a shrewd, eager, licentious face, in response to which he turned his head going past, grinned too obviously, and stared intently into Mirel’s face with the same lustfully voracious eyes with which one stared into the face of an unaccompanied big-city whore:
—So that’s her?
Obviously:
He’d just been told about her and Heler.
And more:
Looking at her, lewd thoughts passed though the mind of this polytechnic student with his lecherous, grinning face.
For some reason his lascivious glance aroused in her an unspoken, lustful excitement that intermixed prurient thoughts with deep inner dejection. The lustful arousal disappeared with the departing sleigh, but the dejection remained, grew stronger, and yielded to an innermost sense of emptiness and regret. All at once she appeared small and demeaned in her own eyes and, wanting to shake off this feeling, for some reason reminded herself of that suburb in the distant metropolis and of him, of Shmulik Zaydenovski himself, remained standing alone near the house for a long while, and reflected:
—At least this Shmulik Zaydenovski looked like a European, and there was no disgrace in appearing in public with him … In any case, there in the provincial capital, everyone admired him …
2.6
Rumors circulated in town about Velvl Burnes:
He was making an excellent marriage, Velvl: he was marrying a beautiful young woman, it was said, a brunette who’d completed her studies at a gymnasium* in the provincial capital and who’d remarked of him to someone else not long before:
—All in all, he’s a thoroughly decent young man, that Velvl Burnes; he certainly stood higher in her estimation than all those of her acquaintances who’d graduated from high schools, and she certainly found no fault whatever in him that his first fiancée had rejected him.
Mirel rarely appeared in public at that time, and no one knew what she was thinking. Only once did she comment on these rumors to the midwife Schatz:
—Quite possibly this young woman who’s completed her studies at the gymnasium is no fool …
Regardless of the fact that the midwife was extremely displeased with this conversation and interrupted her, she went on:
—Be that as it may … she found it insulting and painful, and didn’t want Velvl to get married.
Some time after that, a bleak, depressing Thursday thick with frost descended on the shtetl, and here and there, on the houses of the very poor, the weekly burden of earning a living lay very heavy:
—Prepare for the Sabbath, eh? Is it really time to prepare for the Sabbath again?
Jews without gainful employment stood around the shops in the marketplace chatting about the lavish soirée being held that evening at Tarabay’s house in the village:
—Why not? Is there anything Tarabay can’t afford?
And farther over, at that end of town which bordered on the peasant cottages, Mirel, warmly dressed and unhappy, was seated in Reb Gedalye’s rickety sleigh drawn by his emaciated horses on her way to this party at Tarabay’s home, and in her depression she bade the Gentile lad who was driving her make a detour to the midwife Schatz’s remote cottage.
She was thrown into still greater despondency by the lock she found on the midwife’s door, stood there crestfallen for a while, and finally left in the care of her peasant neighbor the invitation Tarabay had sent the midwife, adding a few words of her own:
—She was to come there immediately, not for the sake of Tarabay who recommended her professional services to all the neighboring landowners, but for her sake, for Mirel.
She paused there a little longer, reconsidering whether or not to go:
—This was really a foolish journey to an equally foolish evening at Tarabay’s. She’d certainly do better to turn back and go home.
Afterward she was intensely downcast and depressed for the entire twenty-four versts of the trip, gazed at the vacant fields all around over which the cold, heavily overcast skies lowered with late winter desolation, and felt even more disheartened and diminished from the fact that far, far behind her, moving swiftly along the road to Tarabay’s home, were the two expensive sleighs of those who were once to have been her in-laws, filling the silence of the fields with the jingle of their bells. She thought:
—The midwife Schatz … If only the midwife Schatz would come as well.
Half an hour later, these two fast-moving sleighs had caught up and drawn level to the left and right of her. Their silence was peculiarly disdainful, these people in these elaborately decorated sleighs moving so rapidly to the left and right of her. She glanced at them as though through a dream and noticed:
With a strained and distant expression on his face, her former fiancé sat in one of these elaborately decorated conveyances, and from the other his warmly clad sisters shouted out across her:
—Velvl! Did you bring it with you?
They shouted calmly and busily across her, as though across an inanimate object, received a mere shake of his head in reply, and swiftly left her behind.
Only when these two sleighs had sped swiftly into the distance and begun to grow smaller against the horizon did she rouse herself from her half-dozing state and notice:
The little Gentile lad who was driving her had been standing up the whole time, ceaselessly whipping the emaciated horses which were striving forward with their last strength, and was apparently trying to overtake those long-vanished other sleighs. She instantly leapt up from her seat and grabbed his shoulders:
—What a wretched madman he was! How long had he been whipping these worn-out beasts?
Ashamed of himself, the little Gentile pulled the exhausted animals to a halt, crept down from the sleigh in great embarrassment, and worked next to one of them for perhaps a full half hour, tying together a halter that had snapped.
Humbly and dejectedly she sat in the sleigh moralizing at him:
—She, Mirel, would be perfectly content if both these pitiful horses were to die on the same night, but as long as they were still struggling for life in this world, one ought to fear God and not whip them.
She arrived in the village just as night had fallen, when lamps had already been lit in all the wealthy Gentile houses, and when the harsh indifference of the glance that these illuminated houses cast on her unfamiliar sleigh intensified from moment to moment:
—The local Gentiles here were peaceable and rich—these houses wished to make clear.—Apart from their land, the local Gentiles here also had a prosperous sugar refinery close by which provided for them abundantly all winter.
By now the gloom of dusk lay on the village’s long paved road that, in company with an entire plateau of rustic roofs, rose higher and higher up the gradual incline of the hill and ended where the sky’s rim was a wash of intense red up into which the refinery’s giant chimney poked like a festive exclamation point. Extraordinarily slowly, the weary horses dragged their way up this residentially developed hill, their heads continually bowed to the ground. And the surrounding houses with their alien appearance awakened a very particular kind of disquiet, the mournful Friday evening disquiet of an observant Jew who’d been delayed in returning home in time to welcome the Sabbath, who in the sanctified twilight was still lugging himself and his wagon through the deep mud on the country roads, hauling himself onward slowly and calling to mind:
There in the brightly lit synagogue in his shtetl, observant Jews were already swaying in prayer, swaying together in unison as they full-throatedly followed the cantor’s lead:
—Give thanks unto the Lord for He is good, for His mercy endureth forever …
With brightly illuminated, new-fangled windows, Nokhem Tarabay’s big house occupied the full breadth of the farthest alley in the village, wordlessly communicating its master’s patently obvious rhetorical question:
—I don’t understand: if God is good and one earns well and enjoys good health, why shouldn’t one live in worldly comfort and ease? Why should one live worse than the Gentile landowners?
&nb
sp; The semicircular courtyard in which her weary conveyance stopped, the open verandah, the high, white-painted front door with its nickel name-plate, all were spotless and neat.
When she finally rang the bell at this front door, the short, perpetually cheerful Nokhem Tarabay, bareheaded and wearing a little black frock coat, immediately ran out to receive her, bowing with his little feet pressed elegantly together.
—Jaśniewielmożna Panna Hurvits has delayed her arrival by fully two hours.
Continually tugging his shirt cuffs from under his coat sleeves, he went on chattering to her in the brightly lit entrance hall while a smartly dressed maid helped her off with her outdoor things:
—The invitation explicitly stated that all guests were to arrive at four o’clock, and now she’d see for herself: his pocket watch was always accurate, and at present it showed exactly six, which even for Mirel wasn’t very polite. But she might be certain: he’d always been a good friend to her and to Reb Gedalye, and he wouldn’t be so much as a single minute late for her wedding.
In the entrance hall, which overflowed with coats of all kinds, she adjusted her hair in front of the huge mirror, glanced at her face and her décolletage, and forced herself to smile at Tarabay who was standing behind her:
—He might certainly believe her: it wasn’t her fault …
But even in the first brightly lit room into which, having taken her arm, Tarabay led her, she was suddenly aware of the alluring power of her graceful figure in its close-fitting cream wool gown. Her gratified heart abruptly swelled with intoxicating pride.
—She’d actually done well to arrive only now … uncommonly well …
She seated herself in one of the low chairs of a suite in a corner of the room opposite Tarabay’s shrewd, truculent wife, felt many of the guests’ glances turn to her, and smilingly answered all their questions:
—Yes … Her mother was a stay-at-home; she’d always been a stay-at-home.
From time to time she stole a glance into the crowded depths of the room and saw:
Heads bent together, glanced sideways at her, and whispered to each other as they did so:
The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Page 12
