“Wasted away a life for nothing,” Mottke said, shocked at his own words.
“You want to become a penitent like that musician who blindfolded himself so that he couldn’t look at women?”
“Too late for that.”
“Yes, brother, for us it might have been too late when we were born,” Zeinvel said. “That business with Freidke was all stuff and nonsense. It’s all made up—the Jewish God, the Christian God. That Chlavna was a clumsy dolt and a miserable coward. Freidke, on the other hand, was putting on an act because he deserted her. Young girls hear old wives’ tales, absorb every trifle, and then they mimic them.
“I had a wild female once, a Talmud teacher’s daughter. Mindle was her name. She looked like a kosher virgin. I could have sworn she couldn’t count to two—a pale little face, big black eyes. It all started when I met her at the pump and filled a pail of water for her. She gave me a pretty thank you and threw in a sweet smile. I was already a thief by then and I had had more women than you have hairs on your head. At that time, it wasn’t easy to get a Jewish girl—not in our parts, anyway—but there was no shortage of shiksas. They don’t know any pretenses. They’ve got Uncle Esau’s blood in their veins. Well, but I saw fire in Mindle’s eyes. Each time I saw her going with her pail, I ran outside with my pail. I must have pumped a hundred pails for her. I began thinking that it was a waste of time. Suddenly I hand her the pail and she slips a note into my hand. I ran so fast with my own pail that I spilled half of it. I walk into the house and I read, ‘Meet me in the cemetery at midnight.’
“One line, that’s all—fancy handwriting. I had tasted everything—girls, matrons, young, old—but I grew as rattled as a yeshiva boy. I was scared, too. In those days I still believed in the creatures of the night. What kind of girl would meet a fellow in the cemetery at midnight? It was said that corpses prayed in the synagogue at night and that if someone walked by they would call him inside to read from the Torah. Also, a carpenter’s daughter had hanged herself in our town because some tramp made her pregnant, and it was said that she climbed out of her grave in the nights and wandered among the tombstones. Just the same, I couldn’t wait for night to fall and, later, for the clock on the town hall to toll eleven-thirty. My piece of goods had figured out everything in advance. Her father, a fervent Hasid who wore two skullcaps, one in front and one in back, went to bed with the chickens. He got up before dawn to bewail the Destruction of the Temple. The mother traveled to fairs to support her older daughter, a penniless widow who lived in Krasnystaw with three children. She sold jackets that she padded herself.
“I’ll cut it short. Mindle had scheduled our meeting for the end of the month, when the moon wasn’t shining and when the mother was off to some fair. The night was hot and dark. The road to the cemetery led through Church Street. The Jews lived close to the marketplace. Farther along, only Gentiles lived—tiny houses and huge dogs. I walked by and they attacked me like a pack of wolves. With one dog you can manage, but with fifty you don’t stand a chance. Besides, when the Gentiles hear their dogs bark, they come running outside with cudgels. I thought I was going to be martyred, but somehow I made it to the cemetery. I tapped, feeling my way like a blind man. I was still a believer then, and in my mind I donated eighteen groschen to charity. I stretched out my arms and there she was, as if she had emerged from the ground. When you’re scared, all desire leaves you, but the moment I touched her she burned me like a hot coal. She whispered a secret in my ear. There was no need for talk. How can such a firebrand grow up in a pious teacher’s house?”
“She satisfied you, eh?” Mottke asked.
“That’s not the word,” Zeinvel said. “We fell on each other and we couldn’t break apart. I took it for granted she was a virgin, but that would be the day!”
“A tasty piece, eh?”
“We lay for hours among the headstones and I couldn’t get enough. As hot as fire and as sharp as a dagger. Whenever I began to cool off she said something so spicy that I shuddered and the game started all over again. Where she had learned such talk in our little village I’ll never know.”
“How is it you didn’t marry her?” Mottke asked.
“Eh? I wanted a respectable girl, not a slut. She spoke frankly: one man to her was like an appetizer. She needed many, always new ones. I’m no saint, but I wished a wife like my mother. In my trade, you’ve got to be ready to do time. To sit in prison and worry that your wife is running around with every bum is scant pleasure. Even as I fondled and kissed her and promised her the moon and the stars, I longed for my Malkele, may she rest in peace. I already knew her by then. She was a friend of my sister Zirel. I wasn’t planning to remain a thief. I wanted to amass a stake and become a horse dealer. But man proposes and God disposes.”
“That means you do believe in God,” Mottke said.
“It only sounds this way. What is God? Who is He? No one has gone up to Heaven and come to an understanding with Him. It’s all written in the Torah, but what’s the Torah? Parchment and ink. Whoever holds the pen writes what pleases him. For nearly two thousand years Jews have been waiting for the Messiah, but he’s in no hurry to show up.”
“So the world is lawless, eh?”
“Whoever can, grabs. And whoever can’t lies six feet under.”
“Still, if good people didn’t send us groats and soup here we would long since have been flat on our backs,” Mottke said.
“They don’t do it for us,” Zeinvel said. “They think this will reserve them golden chairs in Paradise and large portions of the Leviathan.”
“You once said yourself that you believe in fate,” Mottke argued. “You said that the last time you went to steal a horse you knew in advance that you would come a cropper and that it was fated this way. Those were your very words.”
“God is God and fate is fate. I had stolen a half-dozen nags within a few weeks, and the peasants had started sleeping in the stables. They stood guard with axes and rattles. My Malkele begged me: ‘Zeinvel, enough!’ She knelt before me and warned me to stay home. She spoke about opening a store or, if worst came to worst, of going to America. She demanded that I swear on the Pentateuch that I would begin a new life. But even as I took the holy oath I knew that it wasn’t worth a pinch of snuff. It’s not in me to stand in a store and weigh out two ounces of almonds or cream of tartar. I don’t have the patience for such drivel. Nor was I drawn to the land of Columbus. Everyone who went there ended up pressing pants or peddling from door to door. Letters came telling of a depression in New York, of workers picking food out of garbage cans. I loved Malkele, but she wasn’t Mindle. I was faithful to her, God is my witness, but to sit with her days and nights and have her chip away at me didn’t appeal to me. She had miscarried twice. She was constantly bewailing her lot and mine, too. I wanted once and for all to test my luck.”
“You believe in luck?”
“Yes. In good luck and bad luck.”
“There is a God, there is!” Mottke said.
“And if there is, what of it? He sits in the seventh Heaven, the angels flatter Him with their hymns, and He cares as much about us as about last year’s frost.”
“What became of Mindle?” Mottke asked.
“Oh, her father married her off to some dummy, a son of a rich Hasid, a follower of his rabbi’s. My little kitten stood with him under the canopy pure and veiled as if she had never been touched. Why she would allow herself to be used this way is a riddle to me. Such females sometimes marry a fool so that they’ll have someone to dupe easily. There is a great thrill in cheating—almost as much as in stealing. But you pay for everything. She died two years later in childbirth.”
“So that’s how it turned out?”
“Yes. Her husband, the lummox, had gone to his rabbi’s and he lingered there for months. I was doing time in the Janov jail. Later, they transferred me to Lublin. That time I was innocent. I had been falsely accused. When I finally got out, Mindle was already in the other world.”
“It was surely a punishment from God,” Mottke said.
“No.”
It grew silent. Even the cricket had ceased its chirping. After a while Zeinvel said, “I haven’t forgotten her. If there is a Gehenna, I want to lie next to her on one bed of nails.”
Translated by Joseph Singer
Escape from Civilization
I BEGAN to plan my escape from civilization not long after learning the meaning of the word. But the village of Bilgoray, where I lived until I was eighteen, didn’t have enough civilization to run away from. Later, when I went to Warsaw, all I could do was run back to Bilgoray. The idea took on substance only after I arrived in New York. It was here that I started to suffer from some kind of allergy—rose fever, hay fever, dust, who knows? I took pills by the bottleful, but they didn’t do much good. The heat that early spring was as intense as in August. The furnished room where I lived on the West Side was stifling. I am not one to consult with doctors, but I paid a visit to Dr. Gnizdatka, whom I knew from Warsaw and who faithfully read anything that I managed to get published in the Yiddish press.
Dr. Gnizdatka inserted a speculum into my nostrils and a tongue depressor into my mouth and said, “Paskudno.” (“Bad.”)
“What should I do?”
“Move somewhere near the ocean.”
“Where is the ocean?”
“Go to Sea Gate.”
The moment Dr. Gnizdatka spoke the name, I realized that the time had finally come to escape from civilization, and that Sea Gate could serve the same purpose as Haiti or Madagascar. The following morning, I went to the bank and withdrew my savings of seventy-eight dollars, checked out of my room, packed all my belongings into a large cardboard suitcase, and walked to the subway. In a cafeteria on East Broadway, someone had told me that it was easy to get a furnished room in Sea Gate. I carried a few books to be my spiritual mainstay while away from civilization: the Bible, Spinoza’s Ethics, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, as well as a textbook with mathematical formulas. I was then an ardent Spinozist and, according to Spinoza, one can reach immortality only if one meditates upon adequate ideas, which means mathematics.
Because of the heat in New York City, I expected Coney Island to be crowded and the beach lined with bathers. But at Stillwell Avenue, where I got off the train, it was winter. How surprising that in the hour it took me to get from Manhattan to the Island the weather had changed. The sky was overcast, a cold wind blew, and a needle-like rain had begun to fall. The Surf Avenue trolley was empty. At the entrance to Sea Gate there was actually a gate to keep the area private. Two policemen stationed there stopped me and asked who I was and what business I had in Sea Gate. I almost said, “I am running away from civilization,” but I answered, “I came to rent a room.”
“And you brought your baggage along?”
These interrogations in a country that is supposed to be free insulted me, and I asked, “Is that forbidden?”
One policeman whispered something to the other, and both of them laughed. I received permission to cross the frontier.
The rain intensified. I would have liked to ask someone where I could get a room, but there was no one to ask. Sea Gate looked desolate, still deeply sunk in its winter sleep. For courage I reminded myself of Sven Hedin, Nansen, Captain Scott, Amundsen, and other explorers who left the comforts of the cities to discover the mysteries of the world. The rain pounded on my cardboard suitcase like hail. Perhaps it was hailing. The wind tore the hat off my head, and it rolled and flew about like an imp. Suddenly through the downpour I saw a woman beckoning to me from the porch of a house. Her mouth moved, but the wind carried her voice away. She signaled me to come over and find protection from the wild elements. I found myself facing a fancy house with a gabled roof, columns, an ornate door. I walked onto the porch, dropped my suitcase (books and manuscripts can be as heavy as stones), wiped my face with a handkerchief, and was able to see the woman more clearly: a brunette who seemed to me in her thirties, with an olive complexion, black eyes, and classic features. There was something European about her. Her eyebrows were thick. There was no sign of cosmetics on her face. She wore a coat and a beret that reminded me of Poland. She spoke to me in English, but when I answered her and she heard my accent she shifted to Yiddish.
“Who are you looking for? I saw you walking in the rain with that heavy suitcase, and I thought I might …”
I told her I had come to rent a room and she smiled, not without irony.
“Is this the way you look for a room? Carrying your luggage? Please come inside. I have a house full of rooms that are to let.”
She led me into a parlor, the like of which I had seen only in the movies—Oriental rugs, gold-framed pictures, and an elaborate staircase with carvings and a red velvet bannister. Had I entered an ancient palace? The woman was saying, “Isn’t that odd? I’ve just opened the house this minute. It’s been closed for the winter. The weather turned warm and I decided perhaps it’s time. As a rule, the season here begins in late May or early June.”
“Why is the house closed in the winter?” I asked.
“There’s no steam. It’s an old building—seventy or eighty years old. It can be heated, but the system is complicated. The heat comes through here.” She indicated a brass grate in the floor.
I now realized it was much colder inside than outside. There was a staleness in the air characteristic of places that have been without sun for a long time. We stood silent for a moment. Then she asked, “Are you wanting to move in immediately? The electricity isn’t turned on yet and the telephone hasn’t been connected. Usually boarders come to make arrangements, pay a deposit, and move in when the weather has become really warm.”
“I gave up my room in the city.”
The woman looked at me inquisitively and after some hesitation said, “I could swear I’ve seen your picture in the newspaper.”
“Yes, they printed my photograph last week.”
“Are you Warshawsky?”
“That’s me.”
“God in Heaven!”
Darkness had fallen and Esther Royskes lit a candle in a copper candlestick. We were sitting in the kitchen eating supper, like man and wife. She had already told me her whole story: the trouble her ex-husband, a Communist poet, gave her; how she finally divorced him; and how he ran away with his lover to California and left Esther to take care of their two little girls. Two years ago, she had rented this house with the hope that she could earn a living from it, but it did not bring her enough income. People waited until after the Fourth of July and tried to get bargains. Last year, a number of her rooms remained empty.
I put my hand into my pocket, took out the seventy-eight dollars, and offered to give her a down payment, but she protested. “No, you are not going to do that!”
“Why not?”
“First, you have to see what you are taking. It is damp and dark here. You may, God forbid, get a cold. And where will you eat? I would gladly cook for you, but since you tell me you plan to become a vegetarian it may be difficult.”
“I will eat in Coney Island.”
“You will ruin your stomach. All you get there is hot dogs. A man who packs his valise and comes to Sea Gate without any forethought is not practical. It’s a miracle that brought you to me.”
“Yes, it is a miracle.”
Her black eyes gazed at me half mockingly, and I knew that this was the beginning of a serious relationship. She seemed to be aware of it, too. She spoke to me of things that are usually not told to a stranger. The shadows cast on her face by the candlelight reminded me of a charcoal sketch on a canvas. She said, “Last week I was lying in bed reading your story in the paper. The girls were asleep, but I love to read at night. Who writes about ghosts nowadays, I wondered, and in a Yiddish newspaper to boot! You may not believe me but I thought that I would like to meet you. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yes, strange.”
“I want to tell you that there is a romantic story connecte
d with this house. A millionaire built it for his mistress. Then Sea Gate was still a place for the rich and American aristocrats. After his death, his mistress remained here until she died. The furnishings are hers—even the library. She seemed not to have left any will, and the bank sold everything intact. For years it remained unoccupied.”
“Was she beautiful?”
“Come, I will show you her portrait.”
Esther picked up the candlestick. We had to pass through a number of dark rooms to get from the kitchen to the parlor. I stumbled on the thresholds and bumped into rocking chairs. I tripped over a bulge in a rug. Esther took me by the wrist. I felt the warmth of her hand. She asked me, “Are you cold?”
“No. A little.”
In the flickering light of the candle, we stood and gazed at the portrait of the mistress. Her hair was arranged in a high pompadour; her low-cut dress exposed her long neck and the upper part of her breasts. Her eyes seemed alive in the semidarkness. Esther said, “Everything passes. I still find pressed flowers and leaves in her books, but there’s nothing left of her.”
“I’m sure her spirit roams these rooms at night.”
The candlestick in Esther’s hand trembled and the walls, the pictures, and the furniture shook like stage props in a theater. “Don’t say that. I will be afraid to sleep!”
We looked at each other like two mind readers. I remember what I thought then: A situation that a novelist would have to build up slowly, gradually, through a number of chapters, over months or perhaps years, fate has arranged in minutes, in a few strokes. Everything was ready—the characters, the circumstances, the motivations. Well, but in a true drama one can never foresee what will happen the next instant.
The rain had stopped and we were back in the kitchen, drinking tea. I thought it was late, but when I looked at my wristwatch it showed twenty-five past eight. Esther glanced at her watch, too. We sat there for a while, silent. I could see that she was pondering something that required an immediate decision, and I knew what it was. I could almost hear a voice in her mind—perhaps it was the genius of the female species—saying, “It shouldn’t come to him so easily. What does a man think when he’s able to get a woman so quickly?”
The Collected Stories Page 77
