The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (15 page)

Not a single conveyance was stationed in front of the verandah and no one was to be seen there. Only a tall farmer, a szlachticz
*
who’d apparently sought a small loan with which to cover the costs of the coming summer’s work, left the house empty-handed, sighed very deeply, pulled the flaps of his fur hat down over his ears and reflected that as it made no difference now where he ended up, he might as well take himself off wherever his eyes might lead him.

She wandered about aimlessly until it began to grow dark outside and an even darker night began to descend on the shtetl. Not far from her father’s house she met her former fiancé’s eighteen-year-old cousin on his way to take tea with his uncle, and in a despondently quiet monotone she complained to him:

—Did he have any explanation for the blank emptiness that had started taking hold of everything here in town? … There was simply no one here with whom to exchange a word.

Virtually every day thereafter she stood outside next to the house and saw:

With the approach of the midwinter festival of Christmas, the mild frosts grew more severe, and for long gray days on end the dirty, frozen, snow-covered district faced that depressingly murky region toward which the searing wind blew ever more strongly. From that direction, the town awaited yet another ill-starred, drifting snowstorm, hearing the violent sorrow with which the bare languishing trees all around creaked in expectation of it:

—Eventually this new snowstorm must break loose … it must …

In various corners of the town, warmly clad children returned one by one to heder
*
after their lunch. They walked slowly and sluggishly, stopping every now and then with their backs to the wind to muse:

—The blind night’ll come … It’ll definitely come very soon.

Every now and then, along the road that led hither from the dismal murkiness of the fields, a new out-of-town sleigh would arrive, bringing someone else for the festive season, perhaps a lightly dressed and severely chilled telegraph clerk who’d arrived in these parts very early by train. In the teeth of the burning wind, the sleigh swept him farther and farther onward, wordlessly making him fine promises:

—Soon, very soon: there’ll be a cheerfully warm and brightly lit cottage, a home … there’ll be a friendly smile from peasant parents and a long, dark village night—it’s the festive season.

A local Jew who remained arrogant despite being unemployed and having come down in the world approached Mirel slowly, his back stooped. With his arms folded into his sleeves, he stopped, looked into the distance with a sigh, and slowly began telling about his young daughter, a former friend of Mirel’s, who was now in her third year of study in Paris:

—From there she wrote home to say that she’d not be returning any time soon, this daughter of his … She’d not come back until she’d completed her studies.

The man looked broodingly into the distance along the road that led to that substantial, distant village with its sugar refinery where the perpetually jolly and perpetually busy Nokhem Tarabay ran his wealthy household in the style of a nobleman, and even more slowly began relating that this Nokhem Tarabay’s children had all arrived in the village for the Gentile festive season.

—His younger son, the student at the polytechnic, was already there in the village, as well as his older son, a student at the science-oriented high school … and another young polytechnic student, a friend of his son’s, so they say.

Great longing could be heard in the voice of this Jew who’d come down in the world, and he spoke of these two newly arrived polytechnic students with as much tenderness as though both were nothing less than bridegrooms for his pampered daughter who was now in her third year of study in Paris. When he’d finally grown bored with standing here and had wandered away to impart the same information to someone else, Mirel stood near the house for a long time, thinking about herself and about the days that were slipping by:

—Her life dragged by in such a banal fashion … It had been banal right up until this midwinter festive season and it would go on and on being banal.

Far, far away, a mere speck on the horizon, an image of the unknown village with its sugar refinery rose in her mind’s eye, and her yearning heart was drawn in powerless silence to those two young, fresh-faced polytechnic students who were now probably taking a stroll after their long afternoon nap. An image also rose of the big city from which they’d come down only the day before, and the thought occurred:

—Before this Gentile festival, they’d finished some task in the big city … and returning there, they’d prepare themselves to start another.

—And she, Mirel, what had she accomplished up until this midwinter festive season?

She’d been in the provincial capital and for a few days had dragged herself about with a tall, wealthy young man named Shmulik Zaydenovski; the whole shtetl knew about this by now—and nothing would come of it.

Having grown bored with standing outdoors, she went back into the house, lay down on the bed in her room, and thought coldly and indifferently about this young bachelor:

He was a tall young man in a high-crowned beaver hat and a new skunk fur overcoat
*
who ought to be married, and had a youthful father with business interests worth half a million. Strolling about the bustling streets of the provincial capital, he’d stopped on meeting his former Hebrew teacher and told him quietly and with sham earnestness how greatly he admired the work of some Yiddish writer or other and how good the big-city cantors were:

—Both he and the Hebrew teacher had melodious voices and had once accompanied cantors together.

Rich Jews, merchants who’d once known his father, looked at him from the opposite side of the pavement in front of the stock exchange, forgot their business affairs for a moment, reflected on the enormous dowries they’d bestow on their grown-up daughters, and spoke about Shmulik, and about his father whom they’d known long before:

—A very fine young man, this Shmulik Zaydenovski, they say.

But Shmulik himself had made the acquaintance of Mirel Hurvits, and would hear no word about other matches.

And why did she please this rich young bachelor so greatly?

He was now undoubtedly gliding swiftly onward somewhere far, far away, toward the quiet end of a suburb in the distant provincial capital, gliding swiftly onward by himself in his very own sleigh which had been sent out to meet him at the train, longing for Mirel, and thinking about what his parents would soon inquisitively begin demanding of him:

—How do you like Mirel Hurvits?

—And all in all, was she beautiful, this Mirel Hurvits?

She thought long about him, and about many other young men whom she knew, remembered the distant village and Tarabay’s house there, where as a child she’d sought shelter from a summer storm with her father, and thought of Tarabay’s son, the polytechnic student, and of his friend, their guest. Suddenly she paled in agitation, and with her heart pounding rapidly, she recalled Nosn Heler, that charming young bachelor with the fresh, oblong face and the barely visible whiskers who’d completed his studies at the science-oriented school and had twice failed the university entrance examination. A year before, solely on her account, he’d spent the entire spring here in the shtetl, awakening romantic longings in young women to whom he’d never addressed a single word.

During the quiet spring evenings she’d sat with him on the steep hill outside the town center, leaning her head against his shoulder, and listening sadly to him repeating the same thing he’d said the day before and the day before that:

—If she’d break off her engagement to her fiancé Velvl Burnes, he’d complete his studies at the polytechnic, become an engineer in a distant factory, and live with Mirel in an ivy-covered cottage there.

But once, in the late twilight of a spring evening, Mirel vividly pictured herself two years after her marriage to Heler, totally alone, having finished her late afternoon tea, lying on a sofa in that ivy-covered cottage near a factory and thinking indifferently and without the slightest desire in her heart:

—He … Nosn … he’d come home to bed from the factory so often on previous occasions … He’ll definitely come home tonight as well.

And during that same twilight she searched all over the shtetl for Heler, eventually found him, and told him:

—Nothing would come of this, so Heler … Heler could leave the shtetl that very day.

After that, Heler had spent the whole summer with an uncle in the sugar refinery, had strolled all over the village with Nokhem Tarabay’s children, and wanting to take his revenge on Mirel, had gone round saying:

—He certainly wasn’t the first with whom Mirel had exchanged kisses.

Tarabay’s wife and daughter soon got to hear of this, and over in the shtetl someone broadcast it all over the neighborhood.

One Saturday night, not far from the midwife Schatz’s cottage, she encountered three apprentice tailors out for a stroll, made way for them, and heard them making ugly jokes in coarse language about her and Nosn Heler.

—He’s a fool—one of them commented about her new fiancé.—He doesn’t understand that it’s better to have one percent in a good business than a full hundred percent in a bad one.

The day after that, when it was overcast and chilly outdoors and she was on her way to the provincial capital with her fiancé for no reason but to spite someone, she instructed the driver to make a detour to the village where the sugar refinery stood and where Nosn Heler was still idling away his time and, again to spite someone, she stopped in front of Nokhem Tarabay’s house and sent the driver in to borrow a felt coat for Velvl:

—They’d left home so lightly clothed—she instructed the driver to say—that she was afraid Velvl might catch a chill, God forbid.

Subsequently she dreamed all night about Nokhem Tarabay’s house in the village and his family’s out-of-town guest, the polytechnic student, about whom their neighbor, the Jew who’d come down in the world, had told her the day before. Somewhere in the pale darkness she was climbing the bare hill outside the town with this student, smiling at him, and hearing him say:

—She, Mirel, had once had a fiancé; he’d seen him here. What a fool of a fiancé she’d once had!

When she awoke, she couldn’t remember what he looked like, this visiting polytechnic student. She dozed off again with a vaguely troubling yearning in her heart and her hands pressed to her breast, started awake once more with the remembrance of another vague dream in which this polytechnic student closely resembled Nosn Heler, and was unable to tell for which of them her heart longed.

Later, on a beautiful day of freshly fallen snow when, to honor the Gentile festival, the sun had triumphed over the frost, moisture started trickling drop by drop from the blank white roofs and intensified the heart’s longing. With red sashes round their long white fur coats, the Gentile village girls stood around in the marketplace merrily cracking sunflower seeds and laughing at the village lads who were staging mock fights for their benefit. There, in front of the town’s only grocery store at the entrance to the marketplace, Tarabay’s elegantly decorated sleigh stood waiting for his children who were greedily consuming all the chocolate in the shop.

A housewife coming out into the marketplace from inside the store carrying a sack of flour pressed to her belly stopped not far from Reb Gedalye’s house to remark:

—They’re such handsome boys, Tarabay’s children, and his daughter, too … The daughter’s very attractive as well.

Returning to the house with a large bottle of kerosene, the maid also paused next to Mirel on the steps of the verandah to report what she’d seen and heard in the shop.

—Their guest, the polytechnic student, had told the shopkeeper: “In your shtetl there’s a
barishniya
*
named Mirel Hurvits who loves milk chocolate, so for her sake you must stock chocolate.”

The maid went indoors and soon forgot what she’d seen and heard. But Mirel remained standing on the steps of the verandah for a long time, unable to tear her gaze away from the store and the elegantly decorated sleigh in front of it. At length Tarabay’s children emerged, paused to view the shtetl, and took great pleasure in the antics of the schoolboy from the scientific-oriented school who’d caught a kid in the middle of the marketplace. He twisted the animal’s tail, demanding to know how the letters M and E written together were pronounced, and thus forced the kid to respond with a bleating cry of pain:

—Me-eh-eh-eh … me-eh-eh-eh …

Eventually they seated themselves in their vehicle and, setting off for home past Reb Gedalye’s house, all of them, except the girl, stared at Mirel. Tarabay’s son murmured something in the ear of his polytechnic student friend, who had a shrewd, eager, licentious face, in response to which he turned his head going past, grinned too obviously, and stared intently into Mirel’s face with the same lustfully voracious eyes with which one stared into the face of an unaccompanied big-city whore:

—So that’s her?

Obviously:

He’d just been told about her and Heler.

And more:

Looking at her, lewd thoughts passed though the mind of this polytechnic student with his lecherous, grinning face.

For some reason his lascivious glance aroused in her an unspoken, lustful excitement that intermixed prurient thoughts with deep inner dejection. The lustful arousal disappeared with the departing sleigh, but the dejection remained, grew stronger, and yielded to an innermost sense of emptiness and regret. All at once she appeared small and demeaned in her own eyes and, wanting to shake off this feeling, for some reason reminded herself of that suburb in the distant metropolis and of him, of Shmulik Zaydenovski himself, remained standing alone near the house for a long while, and reflected:

—At least this Shmulik Zaydenovski looked like a European, and there was no disgrace in appearing in public with him … In any case, there in the provincial capital, everyone admired him …

Rumors circulated in town about Velvl Burnes: