Shosha

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  ‘Sam, if you don’t stop talking like a clown, I’m leaving.’

  ‘So be it. You won’t hear another peep from me till we go home.’

  ‘I wanted to say something, but he’s mixed me up to the point that I hardly know where I am,’ Betty complained. ‘Oh, yes – there has to be action. But you’re the writer, not I.’

  ‘Really, I’m no playwright. I started to write the thing for myself. I wanted to show the tragedy of the intellectual woman, particularly among Jews who—’

  ‘I don’t consider myself an intellectual but that is my tragedy. Why do you think they conspired against me? Because I had no patience with their gossip, intrigues, and stupidity. Ever since childhood I’ve been like a foreign element around women. My own sisters didn’t understand me. My mother looked at me like a hen that had sat on a duck’s egg and hatched a creature drawn to the water. My father was a scholar – a Hasid, a follower of the Husiatiner rabbi – and the Bolsheviks shot him. Why? He was rich once, but the war had ruined him. People fabricated stories and made false accusations against him. My whole family stayed on in Russia, but I couldn’t remain among the murderers of my father. The truth is that the whole world is full of evildoers.’

  ‘Bettyle, stop talking like that. If I had a million for every good person, Rockefeller would be heating my stove.’

  ‘You’re the first pessimistic woman I’ve ever met,’ Feitelzohn observed. ‘Pessimism is usually a male trait. I can envision a woman with masculine characteristics and gifts – a female Mozart, say, or even an Edison. But a female Schopenhauer is beyond the stretch of imagination. Blind optimism is essential to the concept of woman. All of a sudden, to hear such words from a female!’

  ‘Maybe I’m not a woman?’

  ‘That’s for me to decide!’ Sam shouted. ‘You are one hundred percent a woman – no, not one hundred percent, but a thousand! I’ve had many women in my life, but what she is—’

  ‘Sam!’

  ‘Well, I’ll shut up. Start on the play first thing tomorrow, young man, and don’t worry about the money. Betty sweetheart, stop smoking so much. You’re on your third pack today.’

  ‘Sam, mind your own business.’

  5

  By the time Feitelzohn and I said goodbye to Sam Dreiman and Betty, it was midnight. While shaking hands, Betty squeezed my palm once and then again. She tilted her face toward mine and I caught a whiff of liquor and tobacco. Betty had eaten little, but she had finished several glasses of cognac. She and Sam were staying at the Hotel Bristol and they took a taxi there. Feitelzohn had a room on Dluga Street, but he walked me to Nowolipki Street, where Dora Stolnitz lived. He knew about my affairs. He seldom went to bed before two.

  He took my arm and said, ‘My boy, you caught Betty’s eye for sure – hoo hah! If that play of yours has anything to it, you’re a made man. Sam Dreiman is loaded and he’s crazy about Betty. Get out your manuscript and pack it with all the love and sex it can take.’

  ‘I don’t want to turn it into a piece of trash.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass. Theater is trash by definition. There’s no such thing as a sustaining literary play. Literature must consist of words, just as music must consist of sounds. Once you perform the words on stage or even recite them, they’re already secondhand goods.’

  ‘The audiences won’t come.’

  ‘They’ll come, they’ll come. A guy like Sam Dreiman would think nothing of bribing critics. He may even bribe audiences. The main thing is, don’t spare the schmaltz. Today’s Jews like three things – sex, Torah, and revolution, all mixed together. Give them those and they’ll raise you to the skies. Maybe you have a zloty?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Well, you’re already acting like a millionaire. What do you think about Betty?’

  ‘She seems to be suffering from a persecution complex.’

  ‘Probably a lousy actress, too. But I’m having strange fantasies lately. We spoke of dybbuks today – I’ve been possessed by a dybbuk. He tells me to found an institute of pure hedonism.’

  ‘Isn’t life itself such an institute?’

  ‘Yes and no. All people are hedonists, yes. From cradle to grave, man thinks only of pleasure. What do the pious want? Pleasure in the other world. And what do ascetics want? Spiritual pleasure or whatever. I go even further. For me, pleasure takes in not only life but the whole universe. Spinoza says that God has two attributes known to us – thought and extension. I say that God is pleasure. If pleasure is an attribute, then it must consist of infinite modes. This would mean that there are myriads of unknown pleasures still to be discovered. Of course, if God happens to have an attribute of evil, woe to us. Maybe He isn’t so almighty after all and needs our cooperation. My dybbuk tells me that since we are all parts of Him and since men are the greatest egotists among all creatures – Spinoza says that man’s love of himself is God’s love for man – the pursuit of pleasure is man’s only goal. If he fails here, he must fail in everything else.’

  ‘Doesn’t your dybbuk know that man has already failed? Isn’t the Great War proof enough?’

  ‘It may be proof to me, but not to my dybbuk. He tells me that God suffers from a kind of divine amnesia that made Him lose the purpose of His creation. My dybbuk suspects that God tried to do too much in too short an eternity. He has lost both criterion and control and is badly in need of help.’

  ‘Really, you are joking.’

  ‘Of course I’m joking, but in some foolish way I am also serious. I see Him as a very sick God, so bewildered by His galaxies and the multitude of laws He established that He doesn’t know what He aimed for to start with. Sometimes I look into my own scribblings and discover that I began one kind of work and it turned out to be the opposite of what I intended. Since we are supposed to have been formed in His image, why couldn’t such a thing have happened to Him?’

  ‘So you are going to refresh His memory. Is this the topic of your next article?’

  ‘It could be, but these idiotic editors will not take anything from me. Lately they send everything back. They don’t even bother to read it. By the way, your memory must also be refreshed. You promised me two zlotys.’

  ‘You’re right. Here they are. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you. Please don’t laugh at me. First of all, this crazy Sam gave me too much to drink. Second, after midnight I let go of what is left of my mind. I am not responsible for anything I babble or even think. Since I cannot sleep I must dream with open eyes. Perhaps like me He suffers from insomnia. As a matter of fact, the Good Books tells us He doesn’t doze or sleep but watches over the children of Israel. What a watchman! Good night.’

  ‘Good night. It was a great pleasure. Thank you.’

  ‘Try to write this lousy play. I have lost respect for everything, but I absolutely worship money. If we ever return to idolatry, my temple will be a bank. Here you are.’

  At Nowolipki Street, Feitelzohn held out a warm hand to me and headed home. I rang and the janitor let me in. All the windows in the courtyard were dark but for one on the third floor. For me, spending the night at Dora’s was both a danger (they might raid the apartment and find illegal literature) and a humiliation (we had broken up). She was about to smuggle herself into Russia to take a course in propaganda. Although she denied it heatedly, almost every Communist who crossed the border from Poland was arrested by the Soviets – they were accused of espionage, sabotage, and Trotskyism. More than once I warned her that such a trip was sure suicide, but she said, ‘Those who have been arrested deserved it richly. Fascists, social Fascists, and all the other capitalist lackeys should be liquidated, the quicker the better.’

  ‘Was Hertzke Goldshlag a Fascist? Was Berel Guttman a Fascist? Was your friend Irka a Fascist?’ I demanded.

  ‘Innocent people aren’t jailed in the Soviet Union! That’s done in Warsaw, in Rome, and in New York.’

  No facts or arguments would convince her. She had hypnotized others and was herself under the spell. In my
mind I could see her cross the border at Nieswiez, fall to the ground to kiss the soil of the land of socialism, and promptly be dragged off to jail by the Red guards. There she would sit among dozens like her – hungry and thirsty beside a bucket of slops – and keep on asking herself, ‘Is this possible? What was my crime? I who gave my best years to the socialist ideal.’

  I walked slowly. I had vowed solemnly not to come here again, but I needed her body. I knew that we would be parting forever. Perhaps she was perplexed by doubts herself. Even the most pious experience occasional heretical thoughts. I stopped for a moment on the dark stairs and indulged in a brief introspection. What if I should be arrested with her this night? What kind of justification could I offer myself? Why, as the saying goes, did I crawl with a healthy head to a sickbed? Well, and should I try to refashion my play to suit Betty Slonim’s whims? And what was it Feitelzohn actually wanted? How strange, but during the last few months I heard time and again at the Writers’ Club that someone was arranging an orgy. There was a table at the club that young writers had dubbed the ‘Table of the Impotent.’ Each night after the theater and movies, the older writers – the classicists, newspaper editors, old journalists, and their ladies – gathered there to discuss politics, Jewish topics, and the eroticism that had come into fashion with Freud and the sexual upheavals in Russia, Germany, and the whole Western world. A famous actor, Fritz Bander, had come to Poland from Germany. The Nazi and conservative newspapers had for a time waged a campaign against Bander for corrupting the German language (‘Moischeling,’ they called it), for making insulting remarks about Ludendorff, and for seducing a German aristocratic young lady and driving her to suicide. Bander, a Galician Jew, fell into such a rage from these attacks, as well as from the poor reviews he had been receiving, that he abandoned Berlin for Warsaw. He wanted to do penance and return to the Yiddish theater. He had brought along his Christian sweetheart, Gretel, the wife of a German film director. Her husband had challenged Bander to a duel and threatened him with a gun. Bander now sat every night with his sweetheart at the Table of the Impotent and told jokes in Galician-accented Yiddish. He had been notorious in Berlin for his sexual prowess. In the Romanisches Café on Grenadierstrasse queer tales were told of his adventures. It was the joke at the Warsaw Writers’ Club that Bander’s boastings had sparked the ambitions of the old, sick writer, Roshbaum, to become another Casanova.

  Before knocking on Dora’s door, I stopped to listen. Maybe a meeting of the District Committee was going on inside? Maybe the police were conducting a raid? In this compromised apartment, anything was possible. But no, all was quiet. I knocked three times – a signal between Dora and me – and waited. Soon I heard her footsteps. I never learned why there was no telephone in the apartment, but guessed it was so that the police couldn’t tap the wire.

  Dora was small, broad in the hips and with a huge bosom. She had a crooked nose. Her big, fluttering eyes were her only attractive feature. They reflected a blend of cunning and the solemnity of one who has assumed the mission of saving mankind. She stood at the door now in her nightgown, with a cigarette stuck between her lips. ‘I thought you’d left Warsaw,’ she said.

  ‘Where to? Without saying goodbye?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past you.’

  6

  Although a Communist is forbidden to reveal Party secrets to a member of the enemy class, Dora told me that everything was ready for her departure. It was a matter of a few days. She had already sold pieces of her furniture to neighbors. A Party functionary was scheduled to take over the apartment. I had stored a bundle of manuscripts with her and she reminded me that I must take them away when I left in the morning. Although I had eaten a heavy dinner, Dora insisted I join her for rolls with marinated herring and tea.

  ‘You brought this situation about yourself,’ she said accusingly. ‘If we had lived together like a normal couple, I wouldn’t be going away. The Party doesn’t compel a husband and wife to part, especially when there is a child. We could have had a couple of children by now.’

  ‘And who would suppport them? Comrade Stalin? I’ve been left without work. I owe two months’ rent.’

  ‘Our children wouldn’t have starved. Well, it’s foolish and too late for such talk. You’ll have your children with someone else.’

  ‘I don’t want children with anyone,’ I said.

  ‘The typical degenerate psychology of capitalist stooges. It’s the collapse of the West, the end of civilization. There’s nothing left but to lament the catastrophe. However, Mussolini and Hitler will bring order. Mother Rachel will rise from her grave and lead her children back to Zion. Mahatma Gandhi and his goat will triumph over English imperialism.’

  ‘Dora – enough!’

  ‘Come to bed. This may well be the last time for us.’

  The wire springs of the bed had a depression in the middle and we couldn’t lie apart even if we wanted to. We rolled toward each other and listened in on our own desire. Her flesh was plump, smooth, warm. Her enormous breasts amazed me each time we were together – how could she carry around such a load? She pressed her plump knees against mine and complained that I was hurting her. Our souls (or whatever they may be called) were battered and at odds, but our bodies had remained friendly. I had learned to curb my lust. We indulged in some foreplay, some during-play, and sometimes even some afterplay.

  Dora put a hand on my loin. ‘Do you have my replacement standing by yet?’

  ‘Well, and what about you?’

  ‘There’ll be so much to do there, I won’t have time to think of such things. It’s a hard course. It’s not so easy to adjust to new circumstances. To me love is no game. I have to respect the person first, believe in him, have faith in his thoughts and character.’

  ‘A Russky with all these qualities is awaiting you there.’

  ‘Look who’s talking! You were always ready to trade me for the first available yenta.’

  We kissed and bickered. I listed all her former lovers while she counted off all those with whom I might have betrayed her. ‘You don’t even know the meaning of the word faithful!’ she said. She kissed and bit me. We went to sleep sated and I woke up with lust renewed.

  Dora spoke in a crooning chant, ‘I’ll never forget you, never! My last thoughts on my deathbed will be of you, you reprobate!’

  ‘Dora, I’m worried about you.’

  ‘What are you worried about, you lousy egotist?’

  ‘Your Comrade Stalin is a madman.’

  ‘You’re not even worthy to mention his name. Put your arms around me! It’s better to die in a free land than to live among Fascist dogs.’

  ‘Will you write me?’

  ‘You don’t deserve it, but my first letter will be to you.’

  I dozed off again, and I was in Warsaw and in Moscow at the same time. I came to a square filled with graves. I knocked on a door and a huge Russian answered. He was mother-naked and uncircumcised. I asked for Dora and he replied, ‘Rotting in Siberia.’ A wild party was going on inside. Men played accordions, guitars, balalaikas; nude women danced. A yellow dog came out from the crowd and I recognized her – Jolka, who belonged to the Soltys of Miedzeszyn. But Jolka had died. What was she doing in Moscow? Oh, these trivial dreams, they have no meaning whatsoever, I said in my dream.

  I opened my eyes and beyond the window a murky dawn seemed to be pondering its eternal return. Dora was banging pots in the kitchen. She drew water from the tap and mumbled a song about Charlie Chaplin. I lay still, dazed by the world and its absurdities. She appeared in the doorway. ‘I’m making your breakfast.’

  ‘How is it outside?’

  ‘Snowing.’

  I washed at the kitchen sink. The water was icy.

  Dora said, ‘A pair of your drawers was knocking around here. I washed them.’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘Put them on. And don’t forget to take your Fascist manuscripts.’

  She brought me the drawers and from un
der the bed pulled a bundle of manuscripts tied with a string.

  While I ate, Dora preached: ‘It’s never too late to accept the truth. Spit on all this slime and come with me. Stop writing about those rabbis and spirits and see what the real world looks like. Everything here is corrupt. Over there life is beginning.’

  ‘It’s corrupt all over.’

  ‘Is that your world concept? This could be our last breakfast together. Would you happen to have three zlotys?’

  I counted out three zlotys and gave them to her. It left me with three zlotys and change. The magazine and the publisher owed me some money, but it was impossible to get so much as a groschen out of them. My only hope was an advance from Sam Dreiman. I said goodbye to Dora and promised to come back that evening. I took the bundle of manuscripts and went out into the cold courtyard. A dry snow was falling. On the top of the garbage bin a cat stood poised. She fixed her gooseberry-green eyes on me and meowed. Was she hungry? Forgive me, pussy, I have nothing for you. Dun the malefactor who created you. I went out the gate. There was an infirmary in the building, where the sick came to buy chits to see doctors. Some elderly women wrapped in shawls entered the gate. I imagined that they smelled of toothache and iodine. They spoke at the same time, each about her own sickness. The clouds hovered low. An icy wind blew. I headed for the street and my furnished room. It was just big enough to hold the bed and a single chair and almost as cold as outside. I opened the bundle of manuscripts and to my amazement saw the beginning of a second act of my play. Had Providence ordained this? Somewhere causality and purpose were firmly bonded. I began to read. The Ludmir Maiden bewailed the fact that God had granted all the favors to men and only the leavings to women – the laws connected with childbirth, ablutions in the mikvah, the lighting of the Sabbath candles. She accused Moses of being antifeminist and blamed the evils of the world upon the fact that God was a male. Should I add love and sex to this play? Whom should she love – a doctor, a Cossack? She could be a lesbian, but the Warsaw Jews weren’t ready for this theme. Suddenly I had an idea: she would fall in love with the dybbuk who possessed her. The dybbuk was a man – I’d make him a musician, a cynic, a lecher, an atheist. She would talk in his voice as well as her own. There was a chance that Betty Slonim could play this. She would portray a split personality. She would supposedly wed the dybbuk inside her; he would mistreat her, disappoint her, and she would demand a divorce.