The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (21 page)

—How else? He couldn’t understand: how could he not be present when Reb Gedalye was celebrating his child’s betrothal?

All day Reb Gedalye had been deeply unhappy and depressed, registering nothing of what was said to him. Sitting without speaking on the left of the groom’s father, his bowed head filled with the negative thoughts of one who’d come down in the world, he was fully aware that all these guests had assembled here not for the sake of Gedalye the bankrupt, but for the sake of his relative by marriage, the rich Yankev-Yosl who was worth half a million and flaunted his wealth in the grand manner; that this arrogant, hearty relation-to-be knew this and therefore paid Reb Gedalye no attention. And for their part, the guests pitied Reb Gedalye, and left him in peace.

By now he’d even grown a little afraid of Gitele, who suddenly came up to ask him for his keys. Hunched over, he struggled to his feet in disoriented confusion, groping fumblingly in one pocket after another.

From some distance away, Mirel noticed this. Her heart went out to him in great compassion, and she came up.

—Here they are, your keys … they’re in your top pocket.

His sorrowful expression broke her heart. She’d always believed that her father was strong and would do whatever was necessary to retain his dignity and his self-respect. And now for the first time she saw him impotent, looking truly wretched at his ruin and loss of status. Sadly and in submissive silence she sat beside Gitele and the groom’s mother, listening to that myopic dullard trying to avoid speaking ill of their cousin Ida Shpolianski who also lived in the provincial capital, where she deceived her husband. Starting to report that on one occasion she herself had seen Ida at the theater in company with an officer and a tag-along polytechnic student, the groom’s mother caught herself and tried to gloss over it:

—But then Ida was a well-known person, and her husband Abram was undoubtedly a fine young man. He did business with the provincial administration and was away from home for months at a time. But their home … their home, it’s said, is run on modern lines … free, very free …

Around the substantial, well-supplied tables with their gleaming candelabra, ritually observant guests who’d risen to wash their hands and recite the appropriate blessing before eating had resumed their places. There, after the recitation of the blessing over bread, they were soon beaming with post-Sabbath contentment, drinking toasts and chatting, clinking their glasses together, then drinking and chatting some more. The conversation flowed from sixty eating and drinking mouths simultaneously, but none of this prevented Mirel from feeling as isolated as she’d felt before when she thought of the great provincial capital where she’d live with Shmulik in three or four rooms, and imagined the streets she’d once visited there as a child with Reb Gedalye.

—There one summer evening they’d stroll out somewhere as a couple, would walk slowly and have nothing to say to each other, would return home and again have nothing to speak about there.

No great happiness would derive either from this evening stroll or from that return home. Yet she, Mirel Hurvits …

—What could she possibly do with herself now?

The half-drunk tumult intensified. Shouts of various kinds continually stifled the table hymns other people were trying to start, and the groom’s boisterous father, Yankev-Yosl, drank so much and with such doggedness that it seemed as though he were determined to drown the thought that his son’s marriage was allying him to a pauper who’d recently gone bankrupt and now hadn’t a kopeck to his name. He persistently banged the table with his powerful fist, bottles fell over and spilled their contents, the ceiling lamp trembled and dimmed, yet he went on banging, never once turning to glance at Reb Gedalye, and yelling out to Avreml the rabbi:

—Reb Avreml! Rabbi! I want you to drink! … I want you keep pace in drinking with me!

Mirel still sat in silence at the opposite end of the room. Every now and then it seemed that the cause of all this uproar was not she but some other Mirel who was perfectly content with this betrothal party, and she, the real Mirel, was observing it all as an outsider wholly unconnected with it. And when she roused herself from such moments, she went on believing that there was still considerable doubt about whether she would ever marry this Shmulik who was sitting at the head of the table and to whom all were drinking toasts, and that consequently it was foolish not only for everyone to be rejoicing at this betrothal party as though it were some truly important event, but also for her to have swathed herself in this new gray silk dress and to be sitting here among this foolish company like some sort of chrysalis in a cocoon. Only a few hours earlier, in the mirror in her bedroom, she’d glanced at her own bare arms and her long, tightly laced corset, and had been overcome with a strong desire to have at her side that very Nosn Heler whom she’d previously sent packing. But this desire, too, was nothing more than foolishness, because once before she’d openly told Heler:

—Well, good—she’d marry him. And then what would she do?

And what of Mirel Hurvits herself?

—To all appearances she was now an adult and she felt as unhappy as only a deeply serious person could feel, yet she still remained wholly unaccountable even to herself, and from time to time such foolish thoughts still crept into her head.

She was fully roused from her reveries by the drunken tumult round the circular table, filled with wild outcries, by blessings chanted in the cantorial manner, and by heedlessly interrupted table hymns. For several minutes now, someone over there had been mulishly shouting out her name.

Having made some sort of wager with Nokhem Tarabay, her half-drunk prospective father-in-law Yankev-Yosl had been banging on the table with a glass, broken it, snatched up another, and had started banging again:

—Mirel! Come here! Come here, I’m telling you!

This shouting roused disgusted resentment in her. Making no response, she turned her back on it and saw:

Among a crowd of people listening intently, Shmulik stood in the middle of the room with a foolish expression on his face, singing an extract from the liturgy of the High Holy Days and gesticulating like a cantor.

Earlier she’d longed for him to be absent from the house at this time so that she wouldn’t be obliged to see him, but now despondent indifference had deepened within her, and she found herself without desire of any kind. For a while she stared at him from a distance, and was astonished at herself:

—What could she possibly have wanted him for, this young man? … And taken all in all, what would she do with him all the rest of her days?

Abruptly she left her place at the end of the dining room, went off to her own room, undressed very quickly, and just as quickly lay down in her bed and extinguished the lamp.

Several times after that Gitele knocked on her door, and finally burst in, greatly agitated:

—It’s quite simply scandalous! … Who does things like this? It’s quite simply appalling.

And lying in bed in a state of complete indifference, Mirel replied in some irritation:

—Who told her that this was appalling?

She wanted to fall asleep but was unable to do so because the drunken uproar in the house went on for a long time; only now were tables and chairs carried out of the dining room, and dancing started there in earnest. For a long time she tossed and turned in her bed and was angry with herself:

—In any case, nothing would come of this. It would never lead to any wedding, and she, Mirel … she wasn’t obliged to think of him, of this young man in the dining room who was singing an extract from the liturgy for the High Holy Days and gesticulating like a cantor.

The prospective in-laws spent one more sleepless night here, secretively discussing matters with Reb Gedalye and Gitele.

This went on from Sunday night until Monday morning, and no one in the house went to bed. Around four o’clock in the morning, Mirel was summoned to the dining room as well.

They peered up at her from the low chairs on which they’d been sitting the whole time, and the prospective in-laws inquired of her:

—Well, how did she like the idea of fixing the date of the wedding for the Sabbath after Shavuot?

Mirel stood opposite in silence. There was still a long time before the Sabbath after Shavuot, she thought; until then, much mischief could be made to disrupt these marriage plans. She wanted the prospective in-laws to leave the house taking Shmulik with them as soon as possible, so she replied:

—Good, let it be the Sabbath after Shavuot.

Afterward she slept through the entire misty, muddily mild morning, slept through the thorough cleaning of the dirty, deserted house after the early departure of the prospective in-laws, and long after that, when order, cleanliness, and silence reigned in all the rooms once more and Reb Gedalye and his bookkeeper had hurried off to the provincial capital to which they’d been summoned by a telegram from the Count of Kashperivke’s son-in-law, who’d just arrived from abroad.

Only once did her eyes open on the vacant air of her room. Unwilling to remember what had happened to her, she promptly shut them and dozed off again:

—In any case … what was there to think about?

There was nothing any longer:

—If only she could sleep away all the years that were left to her, and forget about the accounting she needed to make of her life.

In this regard she’d once heard a story:

A story about an exhausted soldier who’d completed his term of military service and, in the middle of winter, returned to his parents’ home in a small shtetl; there he immediately lay down to sleep and slept through the entire winter. He awoke only in the warm days before Passover and saw himself lying outdoors among the bedding that had been carried out to air in the sunshine; somewhere nearby, matzo was being baked, and indoors windows were being washed and walls scrubbed down.

When she opened her eyes on the vacant air of her room for a second time, it was around four o’clock in the afternoon. Silence reigned in the adjacent rooms, and somewhere far away, near the kitchen, Gitele, who’d wakened from a long sleep, could be heard yawning loudly, someone was telling Libke the rabbi’s wife about the favorable impression the prospective in-laws had made here in the shtetl, and then everyone was chattering on, all at the same time, commenting on the unexpected celebration now taking place in the peasant village at the home of the midwife Schatz:

—This was the second day that her acquaintance, the Hebrew poet, had been staying with her; because of his arrival, Poliye, who’d taught in the village the year before, was leaving her present post and returning for Passover very early; and Shabad, the local Hebrew teacher, had already gone there twice, hoping to meet the midwife’s guest, but had missed him on both occasions.

Everything from the betrothal party to settling the wedding date and the abrupt departure of the prospective in-laws now seemed so far in the past that it all appeared well behind her. It seemed scarcely credible that all this had taken place very early that same morning. She had a fleeting image of how the train carrying Shmulik and her prospective in-laws was being borne far, far away through those familiar stations that passed on mute greetings from the distant provincial capital. Extraordinary, the way matters had transpired: that she’d actually been engaged to marry Shmulik, that the whole shtetl knew this, and that on the very next Sabbath her prospective in-laws would make a special
Kiddush
*
in their home where her name would be mentioned when the toasts were proposed.

Rising from her bed, she remembered that she had something to do: she had to write a letter to Shmulik in the provincial capital, giving him clearly to understand that nothing would come of the betrothal. But she felt so at peace, and such a pleasant languor overcame her at the thought that Shmulik was no longer here in the house. Yawning, she soon returned to her bed, reflecting that the chief menace had now passed, and that there was ample time in which to annul the engagement contract.

—There was still quite enough time before the Sabbath after Shavuot.

That evening Gitele came to her in her room, holding out a letter:

—It came in the post, addressed to her, to Mirele.

The letter was from Nosn Heler, and began with those words, it seemed to her, with which so many letters had already begun:

—He understood that she, Mirel, was now a bride.

From its very first words the letter disgusted her, so she put it down next to her, and then tried reading it again:

—She’d been made to listen to a great deal of slander about him, Heler.

Having no patience to go on, however, she laid it down again and never finished reading it.

Subsequently the letter was left lying open on the chair next to her bed, and once, coming in from outside, she noticed:

Gitele suddenly jerk away from her bed and quickly leave the room—and the letter … the letter lay no longer on the chair as it had before, but a little farther away, on the floor. She could have sworn that the prying Gitele had read it.

Later Gitele certainly spent far too much time furtively discussing this with Reb Gedalye who’d arrived home one night.

—She’d read the letter herself, and he continued to address her in the familiar manner of close acquaintances.

Unwilling to hear anything of this, Reb Gedalye was annoyed with Gitele:

—He didn’t know what she was bothering him with all this for—what for? … She was imagining all kinds of ridiculous things!

He was now wholly preoccupied with, and devoting all his time to, the plan that had been proposed to him by the Count’s son-in-law, who’d come down from abroad and redeemed Kashperivke from the bank:

—For a mere eight thousand rubles he was prepared to take Reb Gedalye on as a partner in the ownership of the big wood, would entrust its management to him, and would charge him the price paid by merchants in the provincial capital. Perhaps in this way, Reb Gedalye might be saved financially …