The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (24 page)

She thought:

—Velvl Burnes—he was certainly more ignorant than Shmulik, yet all the same … he certainly didn’t inspire the same disgust.

A few days later, when Shmulik was dogging her footsteps on a walk through the shtetl, she saw Velvl’s buggy waiting in front of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house. She stopped, and without looking at Shmulik, remarked:

—Was her former fiancé really back in the shtetl at present? If his parents weren’t so repellent, she’d call on him with great pleasure.

This was extremely exasperating.

Nothing of her remark made the slightest impression on Shmulik—so insipid was he, possessed of such a cold, one-dimensional soul. Sniffling slightly, he soon went on explaining that he and Mirel wouldn’t be living with his father in the big old house, but in the smaller, newly completed wing at the end of the orchard, the front windows of which overlooked the quiet street of the suburb.

Chatting on in this way, he felt completely at ease with her and took her arm. Without looking at him, however, she disengaged herself, drawing back a little with an expression of displeasure on her face.

—She disliked being taken by the arm … She’d always disliked it and had told him so several times.

The whole way back she was silent and refused to look at him.

At home she reminded herself that Shmulik would certainly be leaving very soon, and immediately felt lighter in both mind and heart. A while later she stood in the early evening darkness that filled her room, peering through the shadowy window and thinking about this:

—Reb Gedalye, too, would undoubtedly soon go off for weeks on end to the new Kashperivke woods.

The tranquility that had reigned before Passover would return to the house, and she, Mirel …

—Soon she’d be able to live here alone once more … whatever else, alone at least.

From dawn onward on a truly hot summer morning, the glowing heat of the scorching, newly risen sun had shimmered before the open windows at the front of the house, heating both panes and frames and playing along floors and walls.

In Reb Gedalye’s house, everyone had risen earlier than usual to prepare Shmulik for his journey. In her darkened bedroom, Mirel caught the sound of people drinking tea with milk in the dining room, of Gitele asking Shmulik where she should pack the butter pastries which had been prepared for him, of the arrival of Avreml the rabbi who’d popped in before morning prayers and was loudly remarking about Shmulik:

—Even if he were to leave at noon, he’d still get to the train in time.

In the courtyard the
britzka
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was being washed, oats were being fed to the horses, and a driver was engaged to take Reb Gedalye to the Kashperivke woods immediately after Shmulik’s departure.

When Mirel rose, it was already late, around ten o’clock. One side of the house was already trapped in the short shade that came with deepening morning, while a light, barely perceptible breeze made its way into the house through the open windows and tugged feebly at the long drapes.

Mirel drank her tea at the table in the dining room around which sat Reb Gedalye and Avreml the rabbi. Still wearing his phylacteries, Shmulik pottered about for a long time. He recalled that during the last two days Mirel hadn’t spoken a single word to him and so was feeling upset and insulted, and he looked down at his own feet treading over the floor. He stole a sideways glance at her no more than once, only to see that she was looking not at him but at the dignified German mechanic who was present, and heard Reb Gedalye say to the bookkeeper:

—He insists that the sawing machinery is better set up near the small ravine, over there … eighty-six desyatins into the woods.

A while later, without his phylacteries, Shmulik went to see Mirel in her room. There he found her alone at the open window.

Standing with her back to him, she did not turn around, and he was overwhelmed with desolation. His face grew sallower by the minute; he was waiting for something.

Abruptly Mirel turned to face him, taking the last two days as an illustration:

—He could expect to have very many such days from her … He’d be unhappy with her for the rest of his life.

What else was there to say? She didn’t love him and couldn’t marry him … She’d no idea what need he had of her. He could certainly still make a good match for himself. She didn’t know very clearly what kind of wife he wanted, but here in the shtetl were Burnes’s two daughters, for example:

—He’d be better off marrying either of them than marrying her.

After an inordinately long pause, when she turned back to face him there were tears in his eyes. Two teardrops overflowed and ran slowly down the sides of his nose, and feeling them, his nose responded to their damp creep with a quiet sni..

Mirel suddenly felt free and at ease, and a thought about his weeping flashed into her mind:

—This means he’s resigned himself to what’s unavoidable …

A short while later she threw on her black scarf, left the room and from the doorway glanced back at him for the last time:

—This meant that they’d go their separate ways … She wished him everything of the best, and wanted to ask only one last thing of him: not to make any kind of disturbance here in the house, but until he left to go on behaving as though they were still betrothed. She begged him not to mention this to anyone here at present. Her parents need be informed of it only later when he, Shmulik, was no longer staying with them … Personally she esteemed him as a decent person, and had every confidence that for her sake he would do as she asked.

Unobserved by the rest of the household, she hurried outside through the kitchen door and went o. to the midwife Schatz.

There she waited with great impatience until the time for boarding the train had passed, lying on the bed in the midwife’s home and thinking:

—Now there was finally an end to it … At last she was rid of Shmulik, and of the engagement contract that had bound her to him.

When Mirel returned home from the midwife’s it was around three o’clock in the afternoon. Next to the houses, short dark shadows lay everywhere, prolonging the tedium of the hot, boring day throughout the entire shtetl.

Deep quiet and peace lay all around Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s house. Behind, a pig dozed in the muddy ditch where the kitchen slops were thrown, and the gate on the front verandah was locked from within, as was the custom on the Sabbath. Apparently everyone inside was taking an afternoon nap.

Mirel entered the courtyard and looked around. The britzka that always stood in its covered port was no longer there. The stable, too, was empty and locked.

—This could mean only that the britzka had already taken Shmulik to the station; that Reb Gedalye, too, had by now gone o. to the Kashperivke woods; and that no one but Gitele was indoors. Now Mirel was filled with longing to enter that quiet house in which no one was to be found.

In the coolness of her room she’d lie in the same place for a long time, and there in the silence she’d think about herself, about the fact that she was free again, and about the possibility that something of significance might yet happen in her life.

But as soon as she reached the dining room she realized her mistake and instantly forgot everything she’d been thinking a moment before.

The house was full of secrets and alarmed disquiet, all of which had been hidden from the town and from people who were in the habit of calling.

From behind closed doors she was summoned to the salon where everyone was seated around the weeping, despondent figure of Shmulik, urging him far too often to drink up a glass of tea that had long grown cold. The aim was to persuade her, in front of Shmulik, to change her mind, and a few tactful questions had already been prepared for her. But she refused to go in. She locked herself up in her own room feeling intensely oppressed and unwell and reflected:

—She’d actually been foolish and childishly naïve … How could she possibly have imagined that everything could be ended so quickly and easily? …

For a long time discussions went on behind the closed doors of the salon from which Shmulik seldom emerged.

Avreml the rabbi was drawn into the heart of these deliberations, the bookkeeper was not permitted to leave the house, and that good friend of the Zaydenovski family who’d been sent here the previous winter was summoned by telegram.

That evening Reb Gedalye came into Mirel’s room and demanded to know:

—What did she want? Could she actually say what she wanted?

Her expression serious and set, Mirel responded coldly and angrily:

—She wanted nothing … She wanted to be left in peace.

As he turned back to the door leading into the salon, Reb Gedalye remarked quietly, as though afraid that someone might overhear:

—He wants to send for his parents … It simply disgraces us in the eyes of the town.

And more:

—Perhaps she imagined that his business affairs had begun to prosper again? Perhaps she imagined that the fifty percent share he held in the Kashperivke woods would give him more than just enough to pay off his debts and then to live frugally and without anxiety for a few years?

He stood there a while longer, pondering the last words he would speak:

—He was obliged to tell her once again: they, he and Gitele, washed their hands of responsibility for her … She could do whatever she thought best.

All was clear: they, her parents, had done everything they could for her. Now they were insisting she become her own mistress and were saying:

—Do as you please.

After Reb Gedalye had left, the situation weighed on her even more heavily than before, and she began to fear her approaching isolation:

—Reb Gedalye and Gitele would bear witness to her never-ending lonely life; they’d never speak of it, but they’d think: “Well, what could they do about it?”

In her dreams that night she saw the angry faces of Shmulik’s parents who were spending hours packing up here in the house, refusing to speak a word to anyone. Suddenly, as dawn broke, she found herself at a window watching her parents’ buggy driving away. Seated in it were Avrom-Moyshe Burnes and his wife, with Shmulik hunched over between them. His head was bowed, his shoulders shook with suppressed sobbing, and Avrom-Moyshe Burnes and his wife were poking the little Gentile boy who was their driver, urging him to drive ever faster to the railway station.

When she awoke, unusually early, her first thought was that Shmulik’s parents were not yet here in the house. As the effects of the oppressive nightmare began to leave her, she lay in bed thinking that there was still time for her to retract … that she could reconsider and decide to marry Shmulik—not for ever, but temporarily, for a while.

Mirel made her peace with her fiancé, and the wedding was again fixed for the Sabbath after Shavuot.

There was much talk about the two brand-new clauses that Mirel had insisted her fiancé insert into her betrothal contract:

—He shouldn’t expect to live with her as a husband lives with a wife.

—And she … she retained the right to leave him and his house for good whenever she chose.

What further explanations were needed?

Even at this late stage, Shmulik Zaydenovski could without doubt still make the happiest of marriages with someone else. If he’d determined to live the rest of his life with Mirel as though every day were Yom Kippur,
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it could only be because he was no less besotted with her than Velvl Burnes had been. But in and of itself the story was extremely intriguing and interesting, and gave ample reason for townsfolk to crowd at windows and doors to watch this couple strolling down the main street—a couple that intended to live not as husband and wife but in some bizarrely different way, as no couple in a shtetl had ever lived before.

For some reason Shmulik now came to seem like some kind of holy man to everyone. As before, he continued to tell long, boring stories to his acquaintances, but now his voice was lowered as though he’d come down in the world, his expression was mournful, and he gave the impression of someone who was fasting. People felt compassion for him, and deplored his luck:

—Just imagine: it’s heartbreaking for him as well … He’s also been gravely misled, and no mistake.

And strolling through the shtetl, Mirel continued to behave so harshly toward him that he dared not even take her arm.

On one occasion, in the middle of the street, she totally ignored him for perhaps half an hour as she stopped to speak with Brokhe, the shoemaker’s wife, who’d been her wet nurse for six months when she was an infant.

—Yes—she remarked very seriously to this Brokhe—your house is falling down. You must definitely rebuild it this summer.

All around, people stood on their verandahs gaping in amazement:

—Did you ever! Is this a way to behave when one goes out walking with a fiancé?

Moreover she insisted that Brokhe’s husband come to measure Shmulik for a pair of shoes, and shouted out loudly after his wife:

—It’s perfectly all right! Your husband’s a good craftsman. He certainly doesn’t stitch leather any worse than the shoemakers in the big cities.

In the end Shmulik stayed on in the shtetl for fully eight days. He constantly looked downcast and postponed his return from day to day.

When he’d finally left, the wedding’s rapid approach began to be keenly felt in the house, and in the kitchen the oven fire burned day and night. There half a dozen women and more bustled about with their arms wet and bared to the elbows, peeling almonds, beating eggs, pounding cinnamon—all under the supervision of a hoarse caterer from out of town, a woman in blue-tinted spectacles who, like a good Jewish widow, spoke little but expeditiously did much.

As before, Reb Gedalye spent weeks away in the Kashperivke woods.

Meanwhile Gitele’s needy out-of-town relative had taken charge of the domestic economy, and the front rooms were crowded with a considerable number of women’s tailors who’d come down from the provincial capital with Mirel’s half-completed clothes and were finishing the work here in the house.