A short while later she threw on her black scarf, left the room and from the doorway glanced back at him for the last time:
—This meant that they’d go their separate ways … She wished him everything of the best, and wanted to ask only one last thing of him: not to make any kind of disturbance here in the house, but until he left to go on behaving as though they were still betrothed. She begged him not to mention this to anyone here at present. Her parents need be informed of it only later when he, Shmulik, was no longer staying with them … Personally she esteemed him as a decent person, and had every confidence that for her sake he would do as she asked.
Unobserved by the rest of the household, she hurried outside through the kitchen door and went o. to the midwife Schatz.
There she waited with great impatience until the time for boarding the train had passed, lying on the bed in the midwife’s home and thinking:
—Now there was finally an end to it … At last she was rid of Shmulik, and of the engagement contract that had bound her to him.
2.13
When Mirel returned home from the midwife’s it was around three o’clock in the afternoon. Next to the houses, short dark shadows lay everywhere, prolonging the tedium of the hot, boring day throughout the entire shtetl.
Deep quiet and peace lay all around Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s house. Behind, a pig dozed in the muddy ditch where the kitchen slops were thrown, and the gate on the front verandah was locked from within, as was the custom on the Sabbath. Apparently everyone inside was taking an afternoon nap.
Mirel entered the courtyard and looked around. The britzka that always stood in its covered port was no longer there. The stable, too, was empty and locked.
—This could mean only that the britzka had already taken Shmulik to the station; that Reb Gedalye, too, had by now gone o. to the Kashperivke woods; and that no one but Gitele was indoors. Now Mirel was filled with longing to enter that quiet house in which no one was to be found.
In the coolness of her room she’d lie in the same place for a long time, and there in the silence she’d think about herself, about the fact that she was free again, and about the possibility that something of significance might yet happen in her life.
But as soon as she reached the dining room she realized her mistake and instantly forgot everything she’d been thinking a moment before.
The house was full of secrets and alarmed disquiet, all of which had been hidden from the town and from people who were in the habit of calling.
From behind closed doors she was summoned to the salon where everyone was seated around the weeping, despondent figure of Shmulik, urging him far too often to drink up a glass of tea that had long grown cold. The aim was to persuade her, in front of Shmulik, to change her mind, and a few tactful questions had already been prepared for her. But she refused to go in. She locked herself up in her own room feeling intensely oppressed and unwell and reflected:
—She’d actually been foolish and childishly naïve … How could she possibly have imagined that everything could be ended so quickly and easily? …
For a long time discussions went on behind the closed doors of the salon from which Shmulik seldom emerged.
Avreml the rabbi was drawn into the heart of these deliberations, the bookkeeper was not permitted to leave the house, and that good friend of the Zaydenovski family who’d been sent here the previous winter was summoned by telegram.
That evening Reb Gedalye came into Mirel’s room and demanded to know:
—What did she want? Could she actually say what she wanted?
Her expression serious and set, Mirel responded coldly and angrily:
—She wanted nothing … She wanted to be left in peace.
As he turned back to the door leading into the salon, Reb Gedalye remarked quietly, as though afraid that someone might overhear:
—He wants to send for his parents … It simply disgraces us in the eyes of the town.
And more:
—Perhaps she imagined that his business affairs had begun to prosper again? Perhaps she imagined that the fifty percent share he held in the Kashperivke woods would give him more than just enough to pay off his debts and then to live frugally and without anxiety for a few years?
He stood there a while longer, pondering the last words he would speak:
—He was obliged to tell her once again: they, he and Gitele, washed their hands of responsibility for her … She could do whatever she thought best.
All was clear: they, her parents, had done everything they could for her. Now they were insisting she become her own mistress and were saying:
—Do as you please.
After Reb Gedalye had left, the situation weighed on her even more heavily than before, and she began to fear her approaching isolation:
—Reb Gedalye and Gitele would bear witness to her never-ending lonely life; they’d never speak of it, but they’d think: “Well, what could they do about it?”
In her dreams that night she saw the angry faces of Shmulik’s parents who were spending hours packing up here in the house, refusing to speak a word to anyone. Suddenly, as dawn broke, she found herself at a window watching her parents’ buggy driving away. Seated in it were Avrom-Moyshe Burnes and his wife, with Shmulik hunched over between them. His head was bowed, his shoulders shook with suppressed sobbing, and Avrom-Moyshe Burnes and his wife were poking the little Gentile boy who was their driver, urging him to drive ever faster to the railway station.
When she awoke, unusually early, her first thought was that Shmulik’s parents were not yet here in the house. As the effects of the oppressive nightmare began to leave her, she lay in bed thinking that there was still time for her to retract … that she could reconsider and decide to marry Shmulik—not for ever, but temporarily, for a while.
Mirel made her peace with her fiancé, and the wedding was again fixed for the Sabbath after Shavuot.
There was much talk about the two brand-new clauses that Mirel had insisted her fiancé insert into her betrothal contract:
—He shouldn’t expect to live with her as a husband lives with a wife.
—And she … she retained the right to leave him and his house for good whenever she chose.
What further explanations were needed?
Even at this late stage, Shmulik Zaydenovski could without doubt still make the happiest of marriages with someone else. If he’d determined to live the rest of his life with Mirel as though every day were Yom Kippur,* it could only be because he was no less besotted with her than Velvl Burnes had been. But in and of itself the story was extremely intriguing and interesting, and gave ample reason for townsfolk to crowd at windows and doors to watch this couple strolling down the main street—a couple that intended to live not as husband and wife but in some bizarrely different way, as no couple in a shtetl had ever lived before.
For some reason Shmulik now came to seem like some kind of holy man to everyone. As before, he continued to tell long, boring stories to his acquaintances, but now his voice was lowered as though he’d come down in the world, his expression was mournful, and he gave the impression of someone who was fasting. People felt compassion for him, and deplored his luck:
—Just imagine: it’s heartbreaking for him as well … He’s also been gravely misled, and no mistake.
And strolling through the shtetl, Mirel continued to behave so harshly toward him that he dared not even take her arm.
On one occasion, in the middle of the street, she totally ignored him for perhaps half an hour as she stopped to speak with Brokhe, the shoemaker’s wife, who’d been her wet nurse for six months when she was an infant.
—Yes—she remarked very seriously to this Brokhe—your house is falling down. You must definitely rebuild it this summer.
All around, people stood on their verandahs gaping in amazement:
—Did you ever! Is this a way to behave when one goes out walking with a fiancé?
Moreover she insisted that Brokhe’s hus
band come to measure Shmulik for a pair of shoes, and shouted out loudly after his wife:
—It’s perfectly all right! Your husband’s a good craftsman. He certainly doesn’t stitch leather any worse than the shoemakers in the big cities.
2.14
In the end Shmulik stayed on in the shtetl for fully eight days. He constantly looked downcast and postponed his return from day to day.
When he’d finally left, the wedding’s rapid approach began to be keenly felt in the house, and in the kitchen the oven fire burned day and night. There half a dozen women and more bustled about with their arms wet and bared to the elbows, peeling almonds, beating eggs, pounding cinnamon—all under the supervision of a hoarse caterer from out of town, a woman in blue-tinted spectacles who, like a good Jewish widow, spoke little but expeditiously did much.
As before, Reb Gedalye spent weeks away in the Kashperivke woods.
Meanwhile Gitele’s needy out-of-town relative had taken charge of the domestic economy, and the front rooms were crowded with a considerable number of women’s tailors who’d come down from the provincial capital with Mirel’s half-completed clothes and were finishing the work here in the house.
In town, people still refused to believe that Mirel was truly going to be married, and the subject was still discussed in Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s dining room:
—Wait and hope. With God’s help she’ll still return the engagement contract to Zaydenovski as well.
For some time now, neither the midwife Schatz nor the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan had called at Reb Gedalye’s house. They went strolling down to the shtetl together every day, grew ever more estranged from Mirel, and no longer found anything of interest in her.
—What could possibly be interesting about her? Had they never seen a young woman about to be married before?
And Mirel, it appeared, was fully aware that she’d recently come down a great deal in the world; was aware of it when she stood all afternoon in the stillness of a room bestrewn with linen; was aware of it when she gathered all this linen together and bent down to pack it into the open trousseau chest. All around her the wedding preparations went steadily forward, and from time to time through the stillness in the cool rooms could be heard the grating rasp of the large tailoring scissors. As he sat bowed over his sewing machine rapidly pumping its treadle with his foot, one of the young tailors’ assistants attempted to break this silence. Wholly unexpectedly, he suddenly burst into fullthroated song:
O my beloved!
On a distant road
I take my way.
Later, the solitary rattle of the rapidly stitching machine was all that could be heard—heard at length, hoarsely and angrily, until it was finally silenced. In the opposite corner, a second machine was preparing to start stitching, while through the open window a mild breeze from the town pressed its way in, blew gently on a curtain high, very high up near the ceiling, and called attention to the fact that in the late April weather outdoors the skies were somewhat overcast and that far, far away in the peasants’ little orchards the fruit trees had been in bloom for some time.
Mirel was summoned to the salon for a fitting. There some ten tailors’ apprentices, suddenly forgetting their upraised needles, stared with idiotic popping eyes at her bare shoulders and arms. And in the newly basted dress she stood before the mirror and remembered:
—She, Mirel, had once been someone and had a very strong aversion to something … and now she was nothing and had come down in the world and had absolutely no idea what would become of her in the future, and yet—absurdly enough—she went on fitting these wedding clothes of hers.
Abruptly she grew agitated and annoyed and pushed aside the tailor who’d been begging her to stand straight.
—What kind of excuses was he trying to make, this tailor? The entire shoulder puckered up, and the dress as a whole was ruined.
One afternoon, one of the young seamstresses from the provincial capital was standing on Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s verandah pressing a new silk dress. She repeatedly picked up the hot pressing iron, sprayed the garment with water from her mouth, and heard one sewing machine pick up the rhythm of stitching from another indoors. Far, far away, near the town bridge to the east, the regular beats of the blacksmith’s hammer died slowly away one after the other, and the shtetl fell silent. Suddenly from the same end of town came the jingling of some out-of-town bridle bells, and an unknown hired chaise drew steadily closer. Sitting up in it was a tall, unfamiliar young man who, in driving by, did not let Reb Gedalye’s house out of his sight for a moment. The young woman briefly forgot about the dress she was pressing, followed the chaise with her eyes as far as the farthest peasant orchards, and composed herself:
—Probably a stranger … probably someone just passing through.
A little while later, however, someone calmly came to the house and reported, quietly and phlegmatically:
—Word has it that the guest she’d entertained before Passover had come to visit the midwife again.
At the time, with her face hot and flushed Mirel was standing in front of the mirror with her shoulders bare, trying on another dress.
—Who?—her eyes suddenly opened wide in astonishment—Who do they say has arrived?
Before she’d received any answer, she’d completely forgotten about the master tailor who was kneeling beside her, pinning her garment from all sides. She rapidly stripped off the unfitted dress and snatched up her everyday jacket.
The tailor, vexed beyond endurance, turned to face the two apprentices who were now left with nothing to do because they’d been working on this dress, and wiped his sweating brow.
—Can you believe Mirel’s caprices! … He’d known them for a long time by now, but this time he’d been certain that they’d finish their work by Tuesday evening and would be able to return home very early on Friday.
But Mirel’s lips were trembling as her fingers buttoned up the little collar of her jacket:
—What did he want of her, this tailor? She’d absolutely no idea what he wanted of her.
Rushing from the salon, she began anticipating the arrival of some visitor with great impatience. Every time the outer door banged, she would dash from her bedroom to the dining room and agitatedly send the maid to look in the entrance hall:
—Well? Who? Who’s come in?
By nightfall her mood was downcast and her face forlorn and weary.
No one had come to call on her.
Wrapped in her summer shawl, she sat alone on the steps of the verandah watching the way the setting sun here and there reddened the tops of the thatched roofs. Scheduled to take place somewhere else through that night was the watch that traditionally preceded a circumcision,* so from the marketplace a magnum of wine was being carried there. The liquid splashed about inside the demijohn, gleamed in the light of the setting sun, and appeared too clear and red, evoking an image of the house in which this watch was to be held: the laid tables, the shining faces of the Jews who’d sit round them and drink toasts to life. And it evoked also an image of a semidetached peasant cottage situated far beyond the town limits that would be illuminated until very late that night, in which the midwife would be sitting with Herz and with the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan. And even while discussing all manner of subjects, all of them would know what had been written in the letter which she, Mirel, had posted off immediately after Passover. Though not one of them would speak a word about it, each would privately reflect:
—What was there to say about it? … A foolish story about a letter … Really, a very foolish story about a letter that Mirel had written …
Very early the next morning the midwife got hold of a borrowed horse and buggy and drove herself at great speed across the shtetl.
Women saw her at sunrise as they were herding their cows out to pasture.
Soon it was common knowledge:
There’d been drinking all night in the midwife’s little cottage at the end of town. Those taking a full part
had been Herz, the midwife herself, her landlady’s son who’d just completed his term of military service, and some teacher or other from a nearby shtetl, a shabby thirty-eight-year-old fellow in a blue peasant blouse who’d once had rabbinical ordination and the daughter of a ritual slaughterer for a wife, but was now in love with a prosperous shopkeeper’s daughter not yet seventeen years of age.
Having drunk too much, Herz had been infuriated that they were trying to discuss Mirel with him, and had said, half in mockery and half in earnest:
—He couldn’t understand what they wanted. She was nothing more than a transitional point in human development, and nothing would come of her. Still, she was a good-looking girl.
During the course of the day, all this was discussed in Reb Gedalye’s house. Someone described the odd impression the midwife had made as she rushed headlong across town in the horse and buggy. Someone else mockingly inquired:
—Please tell us, how old might she be, that midwife?
Searching for something under the mound of linen and clothing around her, Mirel heard this, stopped rummaging for a moment, and fixed a piercing glance on the person speaking.
At dusk she bumped into the midwife in the street. Each young woman stared at the other for a while, had nothing to say, and felt that she hated the other.
Mirel said:
—She’d heard that Herz had come down.
And the midwife smiled maliciously like a tailor’s daughter taking revenge on someone.
—Yes—she said—he’s been here since Sunday.
A pause.
—Will he be staying long?
—A few days.
Another pause.
—Did the midwife know why Herz hadn’t replied to her, Mirel’s, letter?
Then the midwife’s smile grew as spiteful and her laughter as unnatural and poisonous as though Mirel had attempted but failed to snatch something away from her.
—She had no idea why Mirel persisted in running after Herz. He certainly had a great deal more to think about than Mirel and her little letters.
The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Page 19
