Collected Stories (105 page)

“I don’t believe this is the end,” he said. “Perhaps a transition between two modes of existence.”

“If so, how long will it last?”

“Since time has no validity, duration has no meaning.”

“Well, you’ve remained the same with your puzzles and paradoxes. Come, we cannot just stay here if you want to avoid seeing your mourners,” Liza said. “Where should we go?”

“You lead.”

Max Greitzer took her astral arm and they began to rise without purpose, without a destination. As they might have done from an airplane, they looked down at the earth and saw cities, rivers, fields, lakes—everything but human beings.

“Did you say something?” Liza asked.

And Max Greitzer answered. “Of all my disenchantments, immortality is the greatest.”

T
HEY
both lived in my building on Central Park West—he two floors below me, she one above. Greater contrast than those two would be hard to imagine. Morris Terkeltoyb, as I will call him, was a writer of “true stories” for the Yiddish newspaper to which I also contributed. Margit Levy was the former lover of an Italian count. One quality was common to the two of them: I could never learn the truth about either. Morris Terkeltoyb assured me that his stories were invented, but when I read them I realized they couldn’t be all fantasy. They contained details and odd incidents that only life itself could devise. Besides, I often saw him with elderly people who looked like the characters out of his tales. Morris Terkeltoyb was far from being a man of literary skill. His style teemed with clichés. I once saw a manuscript of his at the newspaper. He had no notion of syntax. He used commas and hyphens indiscriminately. Each sentence ended with three dashes. But Morris Terkeltoyb wanted me to believe that he was a creative writer, not a reporter.

In the years I knew him, he told me many lies. Countless women threw themselves into his arms—socialites, stars of the Metropolitan Opera, famous authoresses, ballet dancers, actresses. Each time Morris Terkeltoyb traveled to Europe on vacation, he returned with a list of fresh amorous adventures. Once, he showed me a love letter in handwriting I recognized as his own. He wasn’t even ashamed to include in his stories scenes taken from world literature. Actually, he was a lonesome old bachelor with a sick heart and one kidney. He himself seemed unaware of the missing kidney; I knew about it from a relative of his.

Morris Terkeltoyb was short, broad-shouldered, with remnants of white hair that he combed into a bridge spanning his skull. He had large yellow eyes, a nose like a beak, and a mouth almost without lips—a gash revealing a large set of false teeth. He said he was descended from rabbis and merchants, and he must have studied the Talmud in his youth, because his conversation was filled with quotations from it. Yiddish was his language, but he also spoke a broken English, faulty Polish, and the kind of Yiddish-German that was used at Zionist congresses. Slowly, I managed to dig out some truths from his exaggerations. In Poland he had been engaged to the daughter of a rabbi; she died of typhoid fever a week before the wedding. He had studied in Hildesheimer’s rabbinical seminary in Berlin but never graduated. He attended lectures on philosophy at a university in Switzerland. He had published a few poems in a Yiddish collection and some articles in the Hebrew newspaper the
Morning Star
. Of his mistresses I knew only one—the widow of a Hebrew teacher. I met her at a New Year’s party, and after a few drinks she told me that she had been involved with Morris Terkeltoyb for years. He suffered from insomnia and had periods of impotence. She made fun of his boasting. He had bragged to her that he had had an affair with Isadora Duncan.

The other neighbor, Margit Levy, seemed not to be a liar, but the events of her life were so strange and complicated that I could never figure her out. Her father was a Jew; her mother belonged to the Hungarian aristocracy. Her father was supposed to have committed suicide when he learned that his wife was having an affair with a member of the Esterhazy nobility—a relative of the Esterhazy who was a major figure in the Dreyfus affair. Her mother’s lover committed suicide when he lost his fortune at Monte Carlo. After his death, Margit’s mother became insane and remained in a clinic in Vienna for twenty years. Margit was brought up by her father’s sister, who was the paramour of the Brazilian owner of a coffee plantation. Margit Levy spoke a dozen languages. She had valises filled with photographs, letters, all kinds of documents that testified to the truth of her stories. She used to tell me, “From my life one could write not one book but a whole literature. Hollywood movies are child’s play compared to what happened to me.”

Now Margit Levy lived in a single room as the boarder of an old maid and survived on Social Security. She suffered from rheumatism and could barely walk. She took mincing steps, supporting herself on two canes. Though she claimed to be in her sixties, I calculated that she was well over seventy. Margit Levy existed in a state of confusion. Each time she visited me, she forgot something—her pocketbook, her gloves, her glasses, even one of her canes. Sometimes she dyed her hair red, sometimes black. She rouged her wrinkled face and used too much mascara. There were black bags under her dark eyes. The nails of her crooked fingers were painted bright red. Her neck made me think of a plucked chicken. I told her that I was poor at languages, but she tried again and again to talk to me in French, Italian, Hungarian. Though her name was Jewish, I noticed that she wore a little cross beneath her blouse, and I suspected that she had been converted. Margit Levy had one time borrowed a book of mine from the public library, and after that she became a reader of whatever I wrote. She assured me that she possessed all the powers I described in my stories—telepathy, clairvoyance, premonition, the ability to communicate with the dead. She owned a Ouija board and a small table without nails. Poor as she was, she subscribed to a number of occult magazines. After her first visit to me, she took my hand and said in a trembling voice, “I knew that you would come into my life. This will be my last great friendship.”

And she brought me as a gift a pair of cuff-links that she had inherited from Count Esterhazy—the same Esterhazy who lost eighty thousand crowns in one night and then put a bullet through his head.

It didn’t occur to me to bring my two neighbors together. The truth is that I didn’t invite either one of them. They used to knock on my door, and if I wasn’t too busy I would ask whoever it was to come in, and I would treat him or her to coffee and cookies. Morris Terkeltoyb received Hebrew newspapers from Tel Aviv. When he found a review of a book of mine or even an advertisement, he brought it to me. From time to time, Margit Levy would bake a cake in the oven of the old maid where she boarded, and she would insist on stopping by to give me a piece.

But once it happened that both came in at the same time. Margit found among her papers a letter she had spoken to me about. Morris had discovered a monthly magazine from South Africa that reprinted a sketch of mine. I introduced my guests to each other; though they had been living in the same building for years, they had never met. Margit had become partially deaf in recent months. For some reason she could not pronounce “Terkeltoyb.” She pulled at her ear, frowned, mispronounced the name. At the same time she shouted into Morris Terkeltoyb’s ear as if he were the one who was hard of hearing. Morris spoke to her in English, but she could not understand his accent. He shifted to German. Margit Levy shook her head and made him repeat each word. Like a demanding teacher, she corrected his grammar and pronunciation. He had the habit of swallowing words, and when he became excited his voice was shrill. Without finishing the coffee, he got up and went to the door. “Who is that crazy old woman?” he asked me. He slammed out as if I were to blame for his failure to impress Margit Levy.

When he had left, Margit Levy, who as a rule was exaggeratedly polite with everyone, going so far as to shower compliments on the neighbors’ dogs and cats, called Morris Terkeltoyb an uneducated idiot, a ruffian. Though she knew that I came from Poland, she couldn’t contain her rage and spoke of him as “a Polish schlemiel.” She apologized immediately and assured me that I was an exception. The spots that came out on her cheeks were so red they could be seen through the rouge. She left the coffee I had placed before her. At the door she took both my wrists, kissed me, and pleaded, “Please, my dear, do not let me meet that creature again.”

I imagined that I heard her cry as she made her way up the steps. Margit had a fear of elevators. She had been stuck in one for three hours. Also, an elevator door had closed on her hand, causing her to lose a diamond ring. She sued the building.

After this encounter, I decided never to let one of the two enter my apartment if the other was already there. I had lost patience with both of them. When Morris Terkeltoyb wasn’t boasting of his successes with women or the brilliant offers he got from publishers and universities, he complained about the rudeness he met with from editors, reviewers, officials of the journalists’ union, secretaries of the P.E.N. club. He was accepted nowhere; people were always doing him in. The proofreaders on our newspaper not only refused to correct the mistakes he marked in his stories but they intentionally crippled his text. Once, he caught a makeup man in the composing room reversing lines of type in an article. When Morris protested to the printers’ union, he received no reply. He called Yiddish literature a racket. He accused playwrights of the Yiddish theater of stealing from his stories. He said to me, “You probably believe that I suffer from a persecution mania. You forget that people really do persecute one another.”

“No, I don’t.”

“My own father persecuted me.” And Morris Terkeltoyb recited in a plaintive voice a long monologue that could have been serialized as a dozen chapters on his true-story page. Whenever I tried to interrupt to ask for details, he rushed on with such intensity that there was no way to stop him. He dismissed my questions with an impatient wave of his hand. In the end, his stories left me utterly depressed.

I decided that with all their differences Margit Levy and Morris Terkeltoyb had much in common. Just as he did, Margit mixed up names, dates, episodes. Like him, she accused people who had died years before of innumerable offenses against her. All the evil powers had conspired to ruin Margit Levy. A broker who had invested her money became a devotee of race tracks and squandered her capital. A physician who was supposed to cure her rheumatism gave her an injection that brought out a rash on her body and caused an illness that almost killed her. Often she slipped on ice in winter, fell on escalators in department stores. Her pocketbook was snatched. Once, she was held up in the middle of the day in a street crowded with passers-by. Margit Levy swore that when she went on vacation the spinster who was her landlady wore her dresses and underwear, that she opened her letters, and even helped herself to her medicines.

“Who would use another person’s medicine?” I asked her.

She replied, “If people could, they’d steal each other’s eyes.”

In the summer, I took a long holiday. I went to Switzerland, France, Israel. I left in the middle of August, when my hay fever begins, and came back at the beginning of December. I had paid my rent in advance, locking up my apartment before I left. There was nothing in it for thieves except books and manuscripts.

The day I returned, snow was falling in New York. When I got out of the taxi in front of my building, I was stunned by what I saw. Margit Levy was creeping along on a cane and a crutch, with Morris Terkeltoyb holding on to her arm. With his free hand he was pushing a cartful of food from the supermarket on Columbus Avenue. Margit’s face was yellow from the cold and more wrinkled than ever. She wore a mangy fur coat and a black hat that reminded me of my childhood in Warsaw. She seemed ill, emaciated. Her eyes, too close together, had a piercing expression like those of a bird of prey. Morris Terkeltoyb had also aged. His beaked nose was red, and white whiskers sprouted on his face.

No matter how unusual an event may seem, my astonishment never lasts more than an instant. I approached them and asked, “How are you, my friends?”

Margit shook her head. “The facts speak for themselves.”

Later a neighbor told me that the old maid in whose apartment Margit boarded had given up her place to go to Miami. Margit would have been thrown out into the street. Instead, she had moved in with Morris Terkeltoyb. How this came about my neighbor did not know. I noticed that the name of Margit Levy had been added on Morris Terkeltoyb’s letter box.

A few days after my return, Margit visited me. She wept, mixed German with English, and told me at great length how the selfish spinster had decided without warning to move away, how all the neighbors had treated her misfortune with indifference. The only one who showed humanity was Morris Terkeltoyb. Margit acted as if he had taken her in as just a boarder. But the next day Morris knocked at my door, and from his unfinished sentences and gesticulations it became clear that their relationship was more than that of tenant and boarder. He said, “One gets older, not younger. When you are ill, you need someone to bring you a glass of tea.” He nodded, winked, smiled guiltily and sheepishly, inviting me to come see them in the evening.

I went down after supper. Margit received me as a hostess. The apartment looked clean, there were curtains at the windows, the table had a tablecloth and dishes that could only have belonged to Margit. I brought flowers; she kissed me and wiped away her tears. Margit and Morris continued to address each other as “you” instead of the familiar “thou,” but I thought that I heard Margit forget herself once and use “thou.” They talked to one another in a mishmash of German-English-Yiddish. When Morris Terkeltoyb ate herring with his fingers and started to wipe his hands on his sleeves, Margit said to him, “Use your napkin. This is New York, not Klimontow.”