Collected Stories (101 page)

“ ‘My daughter, what are you talking about? You are my child,’ Bunem Leib said to her. ‘Let this evil fiend only free you, and if Chlavna is not your destined one, I will find another spouse for you, God willing, and we will lead you to the wedding canopy. Merciful God, help me! I can’t take any more of this anguish.’

“Bunem Leib was crying. But Freidke answered, ‘I’m not your daughter but the bull you have given into the hands of a bungler. Take out your knife and slaughter me! Shed my blood! You, Bunem Leib, are a male, not a neuter. No ox, no cow, no sheep or rooster ever ran away from your knife. Kill me, Bunem Leib, kill me!’ ”

“You heard all this?” Zeinvel asked.

“May I hear the Messiah’s ram’s horn as clearly.”

“Go on.”

“It is impossible to tell it all. Toward dawn Bunem Leib became so tired and haggard that he had to go to sleep, but the town’s rowdies took over the show. For them it was fun. Imagine, an only daughter, a quiet little dove, stands in the middle of the night, her breasts uncovered, her red hair wild as a witch’s, and she confesses sins that make your head swim. I heard her say, ‘While alive, I did everything to spite God. I shaved my beard, I ate pork on Yom Kippur, I fornicated with Gentile wenches and Jewish whores. I denied God, and I thought I would live to be a hundred and indulge in all my abominations. But suddenly I got sick with pox and saw that I was done for. Still, to my last breath I blasphemed God and served the idols. When I finally expired, the Burial Society wouldn’t cleanse my body and they buried me without shrouds, at midnight, without anyone saying Kaddish. Even before the gravediggers had thrown the last spadeful of dirt over me, the Angel Dumah opened my grave, spat at me, pierced me with his fiery rod, and dragged me to the very gates of Gehenna. He tried to hurl me inside, but Satan slammed the door and shouted, “It is a disgrace to Gehenna to allow such scum to enter into it.” ’

“You can be the world’s biggest heretic, Zeinvel, but when you see and hear a thing like this, you must admit that there is a God.”

“No, you mustn’t.”

“Then what was all that?”

“Nerves.”

“How do nerves know what goes on in the netherworld?” Mottke asked.

“The nerves know everything.”

“What are they—prophets?”

“Even better than that,” Zeinvel said. “Good night.”

“Well, you are talking nonsense.”

Zeinvel had fallen asleep and was snoring, but Mottke lay awake. He talked to himself: “Gone to sleep, eh? A dunce, a boob … Thinks he knows it all, but to me he’s still a fool.”

“Mottke, shut up.”

“You’re not asleep?”

“I am asleep, but I hear every word anyway. I learned this trick in jail. There, if you fall asleep for real they’ll strip the shirt right off your back. What became of Freidke?”

“How should I know? I stayed there for three days, then I went my way. I haven’t told you everything yet. Neighbors swore to me that Freidke had never sung before. True, a well-brought-up girl doesn’t let her voice be heard, so as not to arouse us males; nevertheless, if a girl has a voice she’ll sing while rocking a child, or she will join in the Sabbath chants. All of a sudden Freidke started singing droll songs in Yiddish, Polish, even in Russian. She serenaded a bride and made wedding jests, all in rhyme. She mocked the women haggling in the butcher shops, and their splashing in the ritual bath. The hoodlums made snide remarks to her, and she answered each one on his own terms. She fast-talked them so, they were left speechless. All the neighbors said the same—this wasn’t Freidke but a wag, a rascal, with a tongue like a razor. His profanities left you rolling with laughter. Brother, I stood by and watched a female turn both into a bull and into a man. Nerves can’t do this.”

“What can do it?”

“Only God.”

“There is no God.”

“How did the world form?” Mottke asked.

“It grew from itself like a scab.”

II

Zeinvel dozed off again, but Mottke still lay awake. The sick in the poorhouse sighed and mumbled in their sleep. Wasn’t Zeinvel right, Mottke reflected. A merciful God wouldn’t allow so much misery. People die like flies here. Each day the Burial Society comes with the ablution board to carry out a body.

For a while Mottke listened to a cricket chirping behind the stove. It jingled as if with little bells. It told a tale without a beginning or an end. How was it that it chirped the whole night, Mottke wondered. Don’t crickets need sleep, too? Or do they sleep during the day? And what do they find to eat among the rags? It was crazy to think that this cricket had a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, and maybe children, too. I’m all befuddled, Mottke mused. I’m dead tired all day, but at night my brain works like a churn.

Sometimes during the day, when Mottke wanted to show off his erudition, he forgot everything, jumbled passages like some ignoramus. But in the middle of the night his brain opened up. He recalled whole chapters of the Scripture, sections of the Gemara, even the liturgies of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. People who had died so long ago that he no longer remembered their names materialized seemingly alive before him. He remembered names of villages in which he had stayed with Yontche. Chants of cantors and songs of Hasidim came back to his mind. Mottke had been raised in a religious home. His father had taken him along to the wonder rabbi at Turisk. As a boy, he had read Hasidic books, had even dreamed of becoming a rabbi. But his father had died of typhus, his mother had married some boor, and Mottke had slipped into the confidence game with Yontche.

Now Mottke began droning a song that he had heard in Turisk at the Sabbath meal:

I’ll sing with praise

To open the gates

Of the Heavenly orchards

For their sacred mates
.

Zeinvel got to coughing and sat up. “Why are you singing in the middle of the night? Are you hungry?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’ve got a burr in your saddle, eh?”

“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.”