—He was a person of refinement, this Montchik.
While he was in private discussion with Mirel in one of the rooms, Libke the rabbi’s wife stood eavesdropping behind the door and heard Mirel give him a categorical answer:
—That’ll never happen … Do you hear, Montchik? … Never!
Afterward they both sat in the dining room. Preoccupied, Montchik stared in front of him with huge round eyes, every now and then making a dismissive gesture:
—He’d say no more … He wouldn’t speak another word about this again.
A spark of deeply wistful sorrow flared in Mirel’s eyes; her face was flushed and she bit her lower lip. All at once she recalled that Montchik had spent eighteen hours traveling on the train, refused to believe that he wasn’t hungry, and, smiling, began frying eggs for him here at the table.
At the same time Libke the rabbi’s wife set out to demonstrate that she too was quite capable of entertaining worldly people. She sat politely at the table and affectedly addressed Montchik in the diction used in Warsaw:*
—Did he have any desire at all to inspect their shtetl?
Glancing at Mirel, Montchik rose distractedly from his chair:
—Yes, certainly … This would be the first time in his life that he’d seen a Jewish shtetl.
In the shtetl, people stood in their doorways watching him and Mirel walk down the street: he in a new light-colored suit and the gleaming white collar and cuffs of a big-city sophisticate, and she in a simple white, elegantly tailored dress with her head uncovered. From a distance she pointed out to him where Avrom-Moyshe Burnes lived, led him to her father’s deserted house, and showed him:
—This was my room.
They paused on the verandah and peered inside through the broken window panes. Mirel raised both her hands to her head to prevent a little comb slipping from her hair, but it fell to the ground nevertheless, and when Montchik restored it to her, she very slowly took it from his hand. For a while they stood smiling at each other.
Darkness was falling, yet she continued to lead him along the side streets. It grew chilly. Montchik remarked:
—It’s strangely cheerless … so utterly and completely cheerless. And yet … Who could know? Perhaps the experience of this moment alone was sufficient to justify the twenty-six years that he, Montchik, had lived in the world.
Looking at him, Mirel stretched out the cold fingers of her left hand for him to press.
With the total darkness of night had come the coolness of a summer evening. Fresh, round, and pale, a new moon rose over the alley at the back of the rabbi’s house where more young women than usual were taking the air, and the coachman from the railway station had already drawn up outside the rabbi’s open front door, the same coachman who’d brought Montchik into town only a few hours earlier. Inside the house, the rabbi’s wife had set a lighted lamp on a windowsill and thus made the little street seem even more festive.
Mirel hastily packed Montchik’s satchel.
—Montchik, look here … Isn’t this your towel?
Montchik was preoccupied and barely heard what was said to him. When two boys from the Talmud Torah approached him for a tip, he took five gold coins from his pocket, looking questioningly at Mirel as he did so, under the impression that this was perhaps too little.
Mirel escorted him out of the house quickly, afraid that he might miss his train.
—He oughtn’t to have come down here—she said.—He’d caused her such strange pain, Montchik had; he’d wrung her heart so sharply. Were he to stay just a little while longer, she might very well do something foolish and not allow him to leave.
She took both his hands and led him to the cab, then stood there with Libke the rabbi’s wife watching the coachman suddenly whip up the horses, turn so abruptly as almost to topple the vehicle, and gallop swiftly off down the road to the railway station.
—He’ll easily be home by tomorrow—she said.—He has so many business affairs there … It’s better that way.
For a short while longer she looked in the direction in which the cab had disappeared, evidently thinking that this was for the best.
Three days after Montchik’s departure, two telegrams suddenly arrived for her from the city suburb. Even while they were still sealed, they told her that Montchik was in his own home again, spent much time there thinking about the day he’d spent with her here, and was once again conducting his business at the banks and on the stock exchange; that Shmulik had already called on him at home and heard the categorical answer she’d sent him through Montchik. Libke the rabbi’s wife was desperate to know what was written in the telegrams, but Mirel had merely glanced at their office of origin and returned them, unopened, to the postman:
—The only answer need be—she told him—that she’d refused to accept these telegrams, that was all; she refused to accept them.
She stayed on in the shtetl as a boarder in the house of Libke the rabbi’s wife, and was noticed every day when she went to the post office to send a great many telegrams and letters to someone who seemed to have no fixed abode. She’d also acquired an unsavory reputation thanks largely to Nosn Heler, who didn’t stop speaking ill about her across the entire district. Safyan, the pharmacist’s assistant, saw her passing as he was standing alone in the pharmacy, earnestly affixing labels to the prescriptions; later he spoke about her to a customer, one of the local intellectuals:
—Would he be so good as to look at her … She was an example to all idlers. And generally speaking, could anyone tell him for what purpose such a person still occupied a place on the earth?
And ordinary people standing about bareheaded inside the pharmacy listened in silence: for a while they forgot about their children lying ravaged with illness at home in their respect for Safyan, who exuded an odor of medicaments, examined the prescriptions with great earnestness before he let them out of his hands, and couldn’t abide idlers.
4.4
Mirel received no answer in response to her telegrams and letters.
She wandered aimlessly about the shtetl, growing sadder and more despondent by the day.
People here openly distanced themselves from her. There was no longer any honor in knowing her, and she knew this and never spoke of it. One evening, however, when she’d wandered along the main street feeling deeply unhappy for longer than usual, she stopped both of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s two daughters, inquired after every member of their family, and fell into conversation with them about Velvl, who because of her had given up coming to his parents’ home from his farm.
—Frankly, it was diffcult to understand why Velvl was hiding from her. After all, she knew perfectly well that he was the truest of good friends to her, and she was even aware that he’d traveled out to the railway station on purpose to bid her farewell.
The second time she met Burnes’s daughters she greeted them amiably and inquired:
—Did they perhaps have a mind to hire a carriage the next day and take a drive of some eight or ten versts out of the shtetl?
This happened at about three in the afternoon of a hot Sunday, shortly after Velvl’s mother had left on a trip abroad in search of relief for her asthma, and the farm buggy, in which Velvl had arrived a few hours earlier to see her off, was still stationed next to Burnes’s verandah.
With all its windows wide open, Avrom-Moyshe’s house stood gazing somewhat forlornly at the saplings growing in a straight row before it, and consoled itself:
—Before the windows of every parvenu’s house, apparently, the trees are always young and small.
All the rooms were cool and quiet, the stillness broken only by the gentle rustling of the leaves outside. There was a strong sense that the mistress of the house had only just left for what would be an extended absence; that the household would now be run by the two daughters who’d forget where they’d left the keys and as a result a jollier and more liberated atmosphere than usual would prevail, that the young people’s guests would linger on until late at n
ight, and that if one of the smaller children had a tantrum about something, there’d be no one to rebuke him and he’d have to be bribed with five kopecks to be quiet.
Avrom-Moyshe Burnes paced about in his study exhaling cigarette smoke, his brow as always furrowed above the regretful expression on his unlearned face. Opposite him, next to the desk, holding a map of the three hundred desyatins of rich, loamy earth he’d leased not long before, stood Velvl, who was consulting his father about what should be sown there:
—Down here near the marsh perhaps it might be better to sow millet?
Suddenly the elder daughter came in to report that Mirel was now in the house and was sitting in the smaller salon. Overcome by guilt, the young woman felt obliged to justify herself:
—What a situation … How could one be so discourteous? … What was one to do when she started peering in through the open windows from outside and asking whether she might call? …
The young woman soon returned to the salon, leaving behind both father and son in a situation so highly unpleasant that they couldn’t bring themselves to look each other in the face. At any moment, it seemed, Mirel would open the door and set foot in the study. Velvl turned pale and started breathing as rapidly as though he’d only just demonstrated some fairground trick and lifted a mass weighing ten pood. He looked across at his father, waiting to see what he would do, but his father’s expression was so shaded, so wreathed in smoke, and so impassive that not the slightest alteration was evident in it. He simply furrowed his unlearned brow even more deeply and exhaled more cigarette smoke; at length his father slowly and silently made his way out through the back door of the house, seated himself in Velvl’s harnessed buggy, and instructed the coachman to drive him to the brick factory where he had business to attend to.
Velvl followed him out through the same back door and strode off through the side streets to the licensed liquor store* where he had to change some money.
Those in the salon, meanwhile, sat around talking about the sounds made by a gramophone, which were very tinny and soon bored the listener to death; about little Ziamke, who knew who Tolstoy was but felt bashful now and wouldn’t say; and about the impoverished gentlewoman who owned land in the village of Pritshepa, an old maid of forty who’d lost her wits again; she’d used the last of her money to buy an automobile and was telling everyone that the local count’s only son would marry her.
Apart from Mirel and Velvl’s sisters, others seated on the velvet chairs were their relative the young external student at the university† who taught the children Hebrew, and the niece of the widow who ran the local inn, a young woman from out of town who was studying dentistry and seemed to be of limited understanding. Standing silently to one side all the while was another young university student, recently brought in as the family tutor from one of the provinces deep in the Russian interior, who’d studied in a yeshiva as a boy. This was the first time he’d seen Mirel in person, but he already knew everything that had happened to her, and not knowing her by sight had often quarreled with both Burnes sisters and with the pharmacist’s assistant, Safyan:
—What nonsense were they speaking? To judge by the picture they themselves painted of Mirel, it seemed to him that she was an interesting person, and there had to be something to her.
Now he was captivated by her young, slightly weary face, and was by no means indifferent to her smile, to the fact that, seated on the red plush sofa, she held her head high and thrown a little back, or to her voice, modulated by the enervated tones of one who’d lived through a great deal yet remained stubbornly loyal to some private ideal and paid no mind to the opinions of others. Hence he held his peace throughout and thought of her as a bridegroom might think of his bride. He kept forgetting that the external student, the family’s young relative, didn’t smoke, and kept approaching him with an outstretched hand and the mien of a beggar:
—Would you please be so kind as to give me a cigarette?
The elder of Velvl’s sisters was the first to hear the buggy driving away from the house and, forgetting where she was, craned her neck like a hen terrified that someone was menacingly following her on tiptoe, and foolishly strained to listen more closely. And for some reason Mirel, who was now aware that there was no longer anyone in the study, asked the external student for a pencil and a sheet of paper.
She seemed to do nothing with this writing equipment, holding the pencil in one hand and the sheet of paper in the other as she smilingly prepared to leave. Yet later, in the pocket of his dustcoat, Velvl found this sheet of paper. On it, in Mirel’s handwriting, were two words in Russian:
—Ty khoroshi—You’re a good person.
He read it again and again all the way home, carried it about among the banknotes in his wallet for several days, and finally hid it in a separate little drawer in his safe.
Mirel finally succeeded in carrying out her plan here in the shtetl.
Quite unexpectedly one morning she received the reply for which she’d been waiting all this time and was greatly pleased with it. On her way back from the post office with this response, she stopped the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan in the middle of the street, told him that his new horn-rimmed spectacles suited his face very well, and firmly declared that he ought to get married:
—She hoped Safyan would believe that she meant every word: he had a profession, so why would he want to drift through life all alone?
A nervous tic spontaneously afflicted the left side of Safyan’s face. He entertained quite definite opinions about getting married and genuinely wished to start airing them, but she interrupted him almost immediately to ask when the nineteenth of the month would be:
—It was essential for her to know this … when exactly the nineteenth of this month would fall.
4.5
The nineteenth day of the secular month happened to correspond exactly to the first day of the Hebrew month of Av, a day on which the heat of the bright sunlight hours of summer seemed to intensify.
The melancholy of the approaching Nine Days lay heavy on the shtetl.* In order to escape its oppression, men took an afternoon nap, cocks crowed either by mistake or out of a sense of desolation, and women couldn’t understand the feeling of wretchedness that prevented them from knitting their socks in peace, and drove them instead from the cover of their own porches to those of their neighbors.
Around three o’clock that very afternoon, a cab driver from the railway station stopped his buggy in front of the inn at the entrance to the marketplace, and down climbed a tall, clean-shaven young man whose throat was swaddled in cotton wool and a great many bandages.
On closer scrutiny he was recognized:
—This was Herz, the midwife’s acquaintance Herz.
Mirel had finally succeeded in getting him to come down here.
From all the surrounding dwellings, people stared at her as she sat beside Libke, the rabbi’s wife, whiling away the tedium on the verandah of the rabbi’s house, and ridiculed her:
—She certainly knew the right time to bring him down … She made him come just in time for Tisha B’Av.
From somewhere she soon learned that Herz was suffering from tonsillitis, so she stopped the local feldsher in the side street next to the rabbi’s house and told him of this illness:
—He was regrettably the kind of person who’d sooner die than admit he was suffering any kind of pain. But if the feldsher were to call on him now, unbidden, he’d certainly let him treat his throat.
The feldsher did as he was asked and went off to the inn.
She herself returned to the verandah of the rabbi’s house and sat down beside Libke the rabbi’s wife to resume whiling away the tedium. She looked sad, and complained to Libke that the day was passing with extraordinary slowness:
—When the shadow of this house reaches the middle of the street, it’s invariably six o’clock, but now … now this seems to be a particularly long day. There doesn’t seem to have been another day as long as this all summer.
Later, when the shadow of this house had started merging with the shadows of all the surrounding houses, she left the verandah and went off along the road that led to the post office. There she met Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s two daughters who were out for a stroll with their tutor, the student. Looking sad, she paused opposite them to inquire about the shortcut across the fields to the railway line, and about a certain well-to-do young woman, an orphan from the local district, who’d been engaged for many years but hadn’t yet married her fiancé:
—Didn’t they remember? Many tales had been told about this young woman once.
Looking at her, both Burnes sisters called to mind their older brother who’d remained unmarried because of her, and knew also that because of her, Herz had now come down here. So they answered: “No, they couldn’t remember.”
—They’d never heard of such a person, they were sure.
The student, however, was greatly excited by this unexpected meeting, and was fully prepared to walk up and down the road with Mirel in the big-city manner. For this reason he tried to continue the conversation:
—Be that as it may … The story about this young woman must be very interesting, whatever the case.
Mirel, however, pretended not to hear and soon took her leave. Walking on beyond the outskirts of the shtetl, she wandered about there alone through the long twilight.
That evening, when people were sitting down to their meal in all the shtetl’s houses and it was difficult to recognize anyone on the dark and deserted streets, she slipped into the inn at the entrance to the marketplace and spent a considerable time with Herz in his room.
The red curtains that hung over Herz’s illuminated windows had been drawn, and no one was wandering about in the street outside except the young woman studying dentistry, the niece of the widow who ran the inn. Intensely curious to know what Herz and Mirel were speaking about in there, she quietly slipped into the empty room adjacent doors with their knotholes, and heard them reopening old wounds:
The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Page 33
