—Was Mirel sure that she didn’t need anything from town?
Looking her up and down, Mirel evaluated her:
Tall and slender, she had a dark, lackluster face with dark, lackluster eyes to match, kept silent for the most part, and would hear no word about the matches that were proposed for her. She gave the impression of never saying anything clever only because she was too tired to do so. In reality, however, her mind, like her mother’s, was too dull and thoughts were rarely born there. But the suspicion persisted that in town this young woman had somehow been made aware of Mirel’s meetings with Heler and would expose them in her mother’s house one of these days.
In response to this last thought, Mirel’s heart pounded and seemed to die away within her. Having watched Rikl disappearing into the distance, she went inside and spent a long time dressing in her bedroom. She then walked over to that side of the suburb where the clanging of newly arrived streetcars could always be heard, seated herself in one that was already brightly lit, and traveled over the long iron bridge that led into the city.
With no moon visible, the late summer evening was silent and dark, its skies brilliant with stars. Below the bridge, placid, dimly illuminated boats glided here and there over the broad surface of the powerfully flowing river, stopped, whistled, drew back, and passed on mute greetings from those of their passengers who’d traveled down to the provincial capital during the day:
—Well, well, well! … They’ve all had a good afternoon nap, these people, so by now they must certainly be in the theater, in their clubs, or in the city parks.
On the hillside directly ahead twinkled the brightly illuminated city, its myriad fires, dense and sparse alike, glittering through the darkness as it flung out the clamor of its early evening tumult. Every time the streetcar stopped, this commotion made itself heard like the croaking of thousands of river frogs, calling to mind the distant, quiet street somewhere along which Nosn Heler was waiting.
This streetcar, its lights burning well before they were necessary, was always packed with people sitting politely and silently in their places. Through this silence, each attempted to suggest that he or she noticed no one else, yet each emerged as a comical figure who gave the impression of being nothing but a capricious being that had only just woken up in a bad mood.
For the most part Mirel hadn’t the faintest interest in any of these creatures, but somewhere behind her there always happened to be a couple of prominent suburban householders who leaned in toward each other and fell into whispered discussion about her:
—Isn’t that Yankev-Yosl Zaydenovski’s daughter-in-law?
At home they’d heard that Zaydenovski’s daughter-in-law was one of those women to whom young men were strongly attracted, so they wanted to see her with their own eyes and with a particular motive as well:
—The whole world says so; surely it’s worth learning what the world finds so fascinating?
On one occasion, an officer who was sitting opposite with his wife stared at her for a long time. He was apparently reminded of his first love and had begun to believe that he’d made a mistake in marrying the woman he had. Mirel was instinctively aware of his gaze and in glancing back at him she opened huge, sorrowful eyes that gazed out, deep and blue, from under the dark lashes of her abiding grief and told of how frustrated her own life had been. Both the officer and Mirel blushed, and, suddenly oppressed by the unyielding corset that stiffy encased her sides, she rose from her place and went to stand on the streetcar’s small open platform.
When she finally alighted where the city’s broad, tumultuous central avenue began, the brilliant white fires of the electric streetlamps had already started blazing everywhere, merging with the glow of the pale twilight and flowing into one festive surge of light. Far, far away in the depths of this arrow-straight road, this festival was apparently being celebrated. From a distance it resembled a candle-lit wedding procession that was drawing near, approaching from some enchanted, turbulent kingdom accompanied by the beating of innumerable unwieldy, deep-toned drums.
Encountering each other on the broad sidewalk opposite were elegantly dressed young men who stared boldly into women’s faces, expensively clad young wives who longed to deceive their husbands but didn’t know how, and crowds of precocious students of both sexes who always looked preoccupied and, finding themselves on one avenue, were continually under the impression that they were missing something on another.
The sidewalk was abruptly intersected by the quiet street with its long central island of trees on which her cousin Ida Shpolianski lived, but she walked straight on. Approaching from the opposite side were still many people festively attired in black evening dress, all of whom were unknown to her. But then the street began to grow quieter, fewer people made their appearance, and she’d already turned left into another hushed, leafy lane.
This lane was already far quieter, even more dense with foliage, and the fourth was illuminated only by simple, dimly burning gas lamps, next to one of which Nosn Heler had been awaiting her coming for some time and from which he now strode impatiently toward her.
Thinking she wouldn’t come, he’d barely been able to compose himself. Now he was afraid that she might be cold and was pleased that she permitted him to throw his broadly cut autumn cloak over both their shoulders. Under this cloak, the hand with which he encircled her waist, the waist of Shmulik Zaydenovski’s young wife, had even started trembling. Her hair, he said, smelled not of perfume but of a scent all its own, the scent that wholly enveloped this fastidious only child.
After all, he remembered her from her little shtetl.
And she kept silent, bearing in mind that whatever drew her to him and led her to wander about aimlessly in his company wouldn’t last long.
She glanced at two obviously wealthy young women approaching from the opposite direction. Both had evidently been born in the big city and knew what a handsome young bachelor signified; they stared at Heler and smiled, walked on for several paces, turned their heads to look behind them, and smiled again. Mirel, however, paid no attention to Heler’s self-absorbed chatter about his penny newspaper, reflecting that she had no use for all this aimless wandering about with him:
For them, for these two young women born in the big city, this might perhaps represent something significant, but for her, Mirel Hurvits …
She herself had sent this fellow Nosn packing once before.
Something else was missing from her life; even as a girl she’d started to develop some awareness of what this might be, but now she’d grown confused in this tumultuous provincial capital to which she’d recently relocated. But this confusion would soon pass …
Assuredly, it would soon pass.
3.2
From day to day, the Nosn Heler she’d known two years earlier revealed more and more of himself. He was still light-minded, and as always his shallowness called to mind a big-city high school student who’d been expelled.
Mirel wasn’t in the least interested in all his chatter about wanting to break off the engagement he’d contracted here in the metropolis four months before to a rich but sickly young woman who was an orphan.
But one evening he importunately began demanding that she should divorce Shmulik and marry him, Nosn Heler, who would make a great financial success of his penny newspaper and was respected here in the provincial capital.
She found this repugnant, and he complained that she wasn’t listening to what he was saying, but was thinking of something else:
—No one made him feel as small and foolish as Mirel did.
Making him no answer, she merely gave him an odd look and stopped coming to meet him in the quiet, leafy lane in the evenings.
From then on she once again passed days on end in utter boredom on the steps of her enclosed verandah, reflecting that of late she’d demeaned herself and dared not permit this to continue:
—After all, even as a girl she’d chosen a course of action for herself, and had only married Sh
mulik provisionally, for the time being.
She had to do something to free herself from her present situation, but didn’t know what.
This was intensely oppressive emotionally.
Moreover, the days themselves dragged by, gloomy, autumnal, and cheerless: every afternoon, overcast skies silently lowered over the deserted, sandy outskirts of the suburb, and every evening the passage of visitors, marked by the regular clang of the iron gate in her mother-in-law’s fence, sharpened awareness that something had to be done:
—Wait … Careful analysis and consideration were called for: what further needed to be done by a young woman who’d grown up as an only child in the home of Reb Gedalye Hurvits, who’d already acquired some glimmering of understanding, and who’d married only in jest and for the time being?
One Sabbath she received a letter from Heler declaring that he loved her and that his life without her was desolate; that on the previous Tuesday his fiancée, who’d been made aware of this, had without his knowledge taken herself off to her brother in Lodz and there demanded that new matchmakers be sent for; that this day was the Sabbath and during all the time that Mirel’s husband would be at home and the two of them would be entertaining guests, he himself would be wandering about all alone along the quiet lane as he did on every other evening because his home was repugnant to him, and while he was suffering unendurable torment, he would think:
—Perhaps … Perhaps she might feel drawn to him after all, and would come?
Unread, the letter drifted about next to her as she lay on the sofa face up, with her hands beneath her head.
Her whole encounter with Heler—a young man with no parents and no siblings, who for the past two years had been kicking his heels in a rented room in the center of the city—now seemed to her excessively wearisome and foolish. She visualized him tediously whiling away his time on that quiet, distant lane next to its only Jewish shop, now shut for the Sabbath; understood how he found everything there soul-deadening, and how dreary he found the rented room in which he couldn’t endure to spend much time. And she was astonished at herself:
—She, who was Mirel Hurvits … What had she needed them for, these trips she’d taken into town to see him day after day?
That Sabbath Shmulik yet again spent the whole afternoon in his white shirtsleeves sleeping in his small study, and yet again, just before sunset, one of his mother’s young relatives awakened him there by tickling him.
—Shmulik! … Open your eyes … The distillery’s on fire, Shmulik!
Mirel couldn’t abide them, these smiling young relatives, and never addressed a single word to them. Passing the open study door she avoided so much as glancing inside. But now, with his eyes open, Shmulik lay on the sofa in there. He stretched the whole of his sleepy body and smiled at her gently and good-naturedly:
—Mirele, will you come across to Father’s, Mirele?
Without looking round at him, she immediately strode into the dining room. A few Sabbaths before, in response to the same question, she’d retorted: “He’d find his own way there without her.” He wasn’t too much of a child to remember this answer and to stop pestering her.
Later, after Shmulik and his father had gone off to Sabbath afternoon prayers, from the dining room she suddenly heard the sharp ring of the new doorbell and the rapid entry of someone making equally rapid inquiries about Shmulik:
—Not here? When will he be back? Has he gone to his father for the last meal of the Sabbath?
This was Shmulik’s cousin, Big Montchik.* In honor of the Sabbath he was wearing a brand-new gray suit and brand-new patent-leather shoes to match. All in all, with the distracted expression of a busy merchant and the energetic frame of a big-city wheeler-dealer, he was in haste to return to the center of the bustling metropolis from which he’d only just come down, as though waiting for him there was not some dishonestly acquired little profit but some entirely new and important debauchery. Indeed, his huge black preoccupied eyes now gleamed even more than usual. Yet for quite some time he sat bareheaded next to Mirel, behaved toward her as though with a newly acquired relative with whom he wished to be on comfortably familiar terms, and told lengthy stories about himself and Shmulik, about the Lithuanian melamed† with whom they’d studied in Uncle Yankev-Yosl’s house when they were children, and about the doves they used to breed in those days, in the very wing in which Mirel and Shmulik now lived.
Once they had as many as ten pairs of doves at one time, so they took a male from one pair and a female from another, locked them up in the small room that was now Shmulik’s study, and had waited to see what would come of it. Could Mirel believe that? Such scamps as they were! And he, Montchik, wasn’t yet ten years old at the time.
To be sure, the notion of locking up an unpaired male and female in the same room had been his, Montchik’s—he’d proposed it, and Shmulik had carried it out. Clearly this was the reason he exuded the air of one well versed in the sins of the big city. And many such sins, it would seem, still lay before him, which explained why he was so powerful, so energetic, and so preoccupied.
Mirel barely heard what he was telling her. Lying on the sofa, she stared at him with enormous eyes and thought that in all her life she’d never before encountered a character like this. Once, during the first days of her arrival, he’d bumped into her in the very middle of the city’s noisiest street and had accompanied her for several blocks. That was when she’d seen for herself that he had a great many acquaintances, both Christian and Jewish, that he was on familiar terms with virtually all of them, and that he shouted after some of them:
—Come and see me this evening; I need you.
—Be sure to be at home at eleven o’clock, d’you hear? At exactly eleven o’clock.
In her mother-in-law’s house they thought the world of this preoccupied young man. Every time he snatched a moment to come down from town to visit them, they surrounded him and peppered him with questions:
—Montchik, why didn’t you come last Sabbath?
—Montchik, Auntie Pearl’s sent you a gift from Warsaw—have you seen it?
—Montchik, will you come to the distillery with us on Sunday?
For some reason, all the Zaydenovskis were excessively fond of him, and since none of them ever remembered that they’d often described him in the same terms to every new member of the family, they’d all start simultaneously repeating that he was very clever, very shrewd, and had been possessed of remarkable intelligence from childhood on, and that he knew a great deal, a very great deal, even though at the age of eighteen he’d abandoned his studies at the commercial school and with his clever head had manipulated his way into some kind of prosperous merchant partnership of which he was still to this day the principal. In the metropolis he had by now acquired a reputation, considerable credit, and a wide acquaintance, and people often sought business advice from him. When he’d run out of things to say here, and, holding his hat in his hand, was ready to take his leave, he suddenly remembered one of these seekers after advice, and delayed his departure a while longer:
—This very week a young man who’d come to seek his advice mentioned that he was an acquaintance of Mirel’s; he was good-looking, this young man, very good-looking indeed; he looked like a Romanian. Wait, what was his surname? … Hel … Hel … Heler, yes, Heler. He wanted to publish a penny newspaper in Russian here, but all told he had a capital of only three thousand rubles. Well! … It wouldn’t work; it wasn’t a viable business proposition.
Mirel’s heart immediately started pounding and almost died within her.
Montchik might’ve mentioned this encounter in passing, simply by chance. But then again, he might’ve had some intention in doing so … He might’ve been sent by her mother-in-law.
For quite some time after Montchik had left, she lay where she was, so calm and detached that she surprised even herself. But quite suddenly she began to resent the fact that Heler moved in the same circles as her husband’s relatives and spoke o
f her, Mirel. She no longer wanted to think about him and, seemingly in anger, rapidly began dressing in order to go that quiet lane on which he was waiting for her:
—No … This had to come to an immediate end; she was disgusted by the whole sorry tale. He’d have to stop building hopes about her, Mirel.
As always Nosn Heler was waiting for her next to the closed post office located on the quiet lane, tensely overwrought and afraid that she wouldn’t come. Every now and then he screwed up his eyes and gazed intently toward the farthest end of the street on which the distant low-hanging sun still blazed down, inflaming the yellowing leaves on the surrounding trees and the roofs on the nearby houses. From time to time some gilded person emblazoned with red-gold sunshine approached from that direction—but it wasn’t Mirel. When he did finally catch sight of her coming toward him, he failed to recognize her and didn’t believe that it could really be she. He remembered that he ought to tell her something about himself, about the unendurable days he’d lived through, about the fact that he could no longer go on in this way. He was strongly attracted to her slender figure and to her face; he wanted to weep.
But coming up to her, he noticed that her expression was sad, severe, and estranged, and he instantly forgot what he wanted to tell her. For a while they stood opposite each other without speaking. While his head was bowed, Mirel glanced at him but said nothing. He heard her draw a long, quiet breath and slowly start walking. He, too, gave a sigh of sorts and followed her. Clearly, she’d come to him for the last time. His whole body trembled. Had he attempted to speak, his teeth might have chattered in his mouth. He looked not at her but opposite, at the closed post office. Its roof still glowed in the last of the sunshine; a missing pane from one of its windows had been patched from within by a sheet of blue paper. Only now did he look at Mirel again, noticing that in the last few days she’d grown very haggard and that there were dark shadows under her eyes; she’d almost certainly locked herself away indoors all that time, and had been tormented by thoughts wholly unrelated to him, Heler. Since this pained him, he said:
The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Page 22
