Collected Stories (100 page)

The hotel was situated in a noisy neighborhood. Young men shouted and girls laughed wantonly. From time to time, I detected a man’s cry followed by a sigh. Was it outside? In another room? Had someone been murdered here? Tortured? Who knows, remnants of the Inquisition might still linger here. I felt bites and scratched. Sweat oozed from me but I made no effort to wipe it away. “This trip was sheer insanity,” I told myself. “The whole situation is filled with menace.”

I fell asleep and this time Mark did not come to wake me. By dawn it turned cold and I covered myself with the same blanket that a few hours earlier had filled me with such disgust. When I awoke, the sun was already burning. I washed myself in lukewarm water from the pitcher on the stand and wiped myself with a rusty towel. I seemed to have resolved everything in my sleep. Riding in the carriage through the city the night before, I had noticed branches of Cook’s Tours and American Express. I had a return ticket to America, an American passport, and traveler’s checks.

When I went down with my valise to the lobby, they told me that I had missed breakfast. The passengers had all gone off to visit churches, a Moorish palace, a museum. Thank God, I had avoided running into Mrs. Metalon and her son and having to justify myself to them. I left a tip for the bus driver with the hotel cashier and went straight to Cook’s. I was afraid of complications, but they cashed my checks and sold me a train ticket to Geneva. I would lose some two hundred dollars to the bus company, but that was my fault, not theirs.

Everything went smoothly. A train was leaving soon for Biarritz. I had booked a bedroom in a Pullman car. I got on and began correcting a manuscript as if nothing had happened.

Toward evening, I felt hungry and the conductor showed me the way to the diner. All the second-class cars were empty. I glanced into the diner. There, at a table near the door, sat Celina Weyerhofer struggling with a pullet.

We stared at each other in silence for a long while; then Mrs. Weyerhofer said, “If this is possible, then even the Messiah can come. On the other hand, I knew that we’d meet again.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“My good husband simply drove me away. God knows I’ve had it up to here with this trip.” She pointed to her throat.

She proposed that I join her, and she served as my interpreter to order a vegetarian meal. She seemed more sane and subdued than I had seen her before. She even appeared younger in her black dress. She said, “You ran away, eh? You did right. You would have been caught in a trap you would never have freed yourself from. She suited you as much as Dr. Weyerhofer suited me.”

“Why did you keep the bus waiting in every city?” I asked.

She pondered. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I don’t know myself. Demons were after me. They misled me with their tricks.”

The waiter brought my vegetables. I chewed and looked out the window as night fell over the harvested fields. The sun set, small and glowing. It rolled down quickly, like a coal from some heavenly conflagration. A nocturnal gloom hovered above the landscape, an eternity that was weary of being eternal. Good God, my father and my grandfather were right to avoid looking at women! Every encounter between a man and a woman leads to sin, disappointment, humiliation. A dread fell upon me that Mark would try to find me and exact revenge.

As if Celina had read my mind, she said, “Don’t worry. She’ll soon comfort herself. What was the reason for your taking this trip? Just to see Spain?”

“I wanted to forget someone who wouldn’t let herself be forgotten.”

“Where is she? In Europe?”

“In America.”

“You can’t forget anything.”

We sat until late, and Mrs. Weyerhofer unfolded to me her fatalistic theory: everything was determined or fixed—every deed, every word, every thought. She herself would die shortly and no doctor or conjurer could help her. She said, “Before you came in here I fantasized that I was arranging a suicide pact with someone. After a night of pleasure, he stuck a knife in my breast.”

“Why a knife, of all things?” I asked. “That’s not a Jewish fantasy. I couldn’t do this even to Hitler.”

“If the woman wants it, it can be an act of love.”

The waiter came back and mumbled something.

Mrs. Weyerhofer explained, “We’re the only ones in the dining car. They want to close up.”

“I’m finished,” I said. “Gastronomically and otherwise.”

“Don’t rush,” she said. “Unlike the driver of our ill-starred bus, the forces that drive us mad have all the time in the world.”

I

A
T
nine in the evening the poorhouse attendant extinguished the kerosene lamp. He left burning a single tallow candle, which soon began to flicker. Outside, the frost glistened, but inside the poorhouse it was warm. The gravely ill lay in beds. The others slept on straw pallets on the floor.

Next to the over lay Zeinvel the thief, whom peasants had crippled when they caught him stealing a horse, and Mottke the beadle, who for a long time had served as beadle to a bogus rabbi named Yontche, a cobbler who donned a Hasidic rabbi’s attire and traveled through the Polish towns allegedly performing miracles. They had gone as far as Lithuania together. Yontche was subsequently caught in the act with a servant girl and fled to America. Mottke, too, tried to escape to America, but he was detained on Ellis Island and then deported because of trachoma. Later he became half blind. Both Mottke the beadle and Zeinvel the thief had lived in the poorhouse for years, although in separate rooms most of the time.

Zeinvel was tall, and as black as a gypsy, with slanted eyes, a head of black hair, and a mouth full of white teeth. Besides being lame, he suffered from consumption. As a young man he had had the reputation of being a dandy. He managed to trim his beard even in the poorhouse. Mottke was small, round like a barrel, with tufts of flax-blond hair around his scabby skull and with a yellow beard that grew on one cheek only. His eyes were always swollen and half closed. He was something of a scholar, and it was said that he and Yontche used to switch roles. One month Yontche would be the rabbi and Mottke the beadle; the next month it was the other way around.

After a while the tallow candle went out. A full moon was shining outside and its light reflected up from the snow upon the poorhouse walls. Zeinvel and Mottke never went to sleep before midnight. They chatted and told stories.

Mottke was saying, “Cold outside, eh? It’s going to get even colder. Here in Poland the cold is still bearable, but when a frost comes up in Lithuania oaks burst in the forests. One thing is good there—wood is cheap. The villages are tiny, but almost all the men are learned. You meet a carpenter or a blacksmith—by day he planes a board or pounds his hammer on the anvil, but after the evening services he reads a chapter of the Mishnah to a group in the study house. They don’t set much store by Hasidic rabbis. You can travel half of Lithuania without seeing a Hasid. The men avoided us, but the women used to come to us on the sly, and brought whatever they could—a chicken, a dozen eggs, a measure of buckwheat, even a garland of garlic. There’s no lack of sickness anywhere, and we gave them all kinds of remedies—cow’s eggs with duck milk, as well as various amulets and talismans we both invented. When we were in Lithuania, a thing happened that turned a village topsy-turvy.”

“What happened?” Zeinvel asked.

“Something with a dybbuk.”

“A dybbuk in Lithuania?”

“Yes, in Lithuania. I had been told that the Litvaks didn’t believe in dybbuks. The Vilna Gaon didn’t believe in such things, and from the Vilna Gaon to God is but one step. But what the eyes see can’t be denied. The name of the village was Zabrynka. When Yontche and I got there, the ritual slaughterer invited us for the Sabbath repast. In Lithuania a Sabbath guest doesn’t sleep in the poorhouse. A bed is made up for him at his host’s house. The slaughterer’s name was Bunem Leib, and his wife’s Hiene—a name not heard in our parts. They had only one daughter, Freidke, a short girl with red hair and freckles. She was already engaged to a youth who was studying slaughtering under her father. His name was Chlavna. In Lithuania they have the queerest names. He was a handsome young man—tall, dark, well dressed. In Lithuania no one wears a satin robe on the Sabbath, unless maybe a rabbi. Nor are their earlocks as long as here in Poland. Everything with them is different. We put sugar into gefilte fish, they put pepper.

“Yontche was a glutton. The moment he entered a house, he took right to the food. I like to look around. I noticed that Freidke was madly in love with Chlavna. She never took her eyes off him. Her eyes were blue, sharp, and kind of melancholy. Why? It’s in my nature that I notice things whether they concern me or not. A healthy young fellow should have an appetite, but it struck me that Chlavna hardly ate a thing. Whatever was served him, he left over—the Sabbath loaf, the soup, the meat, even the carrot stew. When Hiene served him a glass of tea, his hand trembled so that he spilled it on the tablecloth. Eh, I thought, a slaughterer’s hand shouldn’t tremble. That won’t do.

“Yontche and I celebrated the Sabbath there, and after the Sabbath we went our way. We didn’t know it then, but that winter was our last together. We hadn’t had much luck in Lithuania, and Yontche acted more like a coachman than like a rabbi. Usually when I left a town I soon forgot everyone there, but I sat in the sleigh thinking about Freidke and Chlavna and I knew somehow that I’d be coming back to Zabrynka. But why? What did these strangers mean to me?

“We came to another town and there I really quarreled with Yontche, and told him that he was an outcast and that he should go to blazes. I felt so downhearted I went to a tavern. I sat down, took a shot of vodka, and someone came up to me—a little shipping agent—and said, ‘You don’t recognize me, but we met in Zabrynka. You are the beadle.’

“ ‘What’s happening in Zabrynka?’ I asked, and he said, ‘You haven’t heard the news? A dybbuk has entered the slaughterer’s daughter.’

“ ‘A dybbuk?’ I said. ‘In Freidke?’

“And he told me this story: That Sabbath night, soon after we had left town, the butchers brought to Bunem Leib a large black bull with spiral horns, a tough beast. Since Freidke’s fiancé, Chlavna, had learned the craft, with all its laws, and had already slaughtered several calves, Bunem Leib decided to let him slaughter it. When a bull is slaughtered, the butchers tie him with ropes, throw him to the ground, and hold him until he bleeds to death. But when Chlavna made the benediction and slashed the bull’s throat the animal tore loose, lunged to its feet, and began to run round with such fury that he nearly brought down the slaughterhouse. He went racing across the marketplace and cracked a lamppost and overturned a wagon. All this time, the blood gushed from him as if from a tap. After a long chase, the butchers caught him and dragged him back to the slaughterhouse, already a carcass. Only then did they discover that Chlavna had vanished. Someone said that he was seen leaning over the well. Others saw him running toward the river. They searched with poles, but he wasn’t found. The rabbi examined the knife Chlavna used and he found the blade jagged. The bull was declared unkosher. The butchers fell into such a rage against Bunem Leib for turning the job over to Chlavna that they shattered his windowpanes.

“That night was to Bunem Leib and to his household one long turmoil. At dawn, when he and his wife had finally dozed off, they were roused by a strange wail—not human but animal. Freidke stood naked in the center of the room bellowing like an ox. She was shaking, jerking, and lowing, as if she were the very bull her fiancé had botched. Then a terrible human voice tore itself out from her mouth. All Zabrynka came running, and it became clear that a dybbuk had entered Freidke. The dybbuk cried that he had been a man in life—an evildoer, a drunk, a lecher. When he died, his soul hadn’t been allowed into Heaven but had been sentenced to be reincarnated as a bull. The Angel of Death told him that when this bull was slaughtered according to the ritual law and pious Jews ate his flesh after reciting the right benediction, he, the sinner, would be redeemed. Now that Chlavna had rendered the meat impure, the sinner’s forsaken soul had entered Freidke.

“I was so taken aback by what the shipping agent told me that I left Yontche bag and baggage, grabbed my bundle, and headed back to Zabrynka. A deep snow had fallen and a bitter frost had settled in. I couldn’t get a sleigh and I had to walk halfway there. The wind nearly blew me away. I was sure that my end had come and I began to say my confession.”

“You fell in love with that Freidke, eh?”

“In love? You talk nonsense.”

“What happened next?” Zeinvel asked.

“I came to Zabrynka in the middle of the night. The shutters were locked everywhere, but Bunem Leib’s house was lit up and there were people inside. They seemed to have stayed to listen to the dybbuk instead of going to sleep. No one took notice of me when I entered. I learned later that Freidke’s mother had become ill from grief and had been taken to some relative. I barely recognized Bunem Leib. He had become emaciated, yellow, and drained in the few days since I was there. Freidke stood there barefoot, half naked, with straggly red hair over her shoulders, her face as white as that of a corpse and her eyes bulging. She screamed with a voice I could never have believed could come out of a girl’s tender throat. This was not a human voice but that of an ox. I heard her bellow, ‘Slaughter me, Bunem Leib, slaughter me! I am the bull you caused to be
tref
and so doomed to eternal torment. You don’t see them, but hordes of demons, hobgoblins, and devils are lurking right here waiting to tear me to pieces and carry me away to the wastelands behind the Dark Mountains. Neither your mezuzah nor the talismans and amulets you hung in all the corners of the house can help me. Look, if you are not completely blind: monsters with noses to their navels, with snakes instead of hair, with snouts of boars, as black as pitch, as red as fire, as green as gall! They dance and howl like the mad. Is it my fault, Bunem Leib, that you have chosen for your son-in-law a schlemiel, a mollycoddle who cannot wield a knife? He could as much be a slaughterer as you could be a wet nurse. His hands were shaking like those of a man of ninety. He was such a weakling that when he saw a drop of blood on the white of an egg he was ready to faint. A slaughterer cannot be afraid of blood. A real man doesn’t run away from his bride-to-be when things go wrong. You picked a mama’s boy for your daughter, a pampered little brat, a eunuch. He was more afraid of me, the bull, than I was of his knife! Slaughter me, Bunem Leib, and save me from all these vicious spirits. If not, I will catch you on my horns and gore you and carry you away to swamps from which there can never be any rescue.’