The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (25 page)

In town, people still refused to believe that Mirel was truly going to be married, and the subject was still discussed in Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s dining room:

—Wait and hope. With God’s help she’ll still return the engagement contract to Zaydenovski as well.

For some time now, neither the midwife Schatz nor the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan had called at Reb Gedalye’s house. They went strolling down to the shtetl together every day, grew ever more estranged from Mirel, and no longer found anything of interest in her.

—What could possibly be interesting about her? Had they never seen a young woman about to be married before?

And Mirel, it appeared, was fully aware that she’d recently come down a great deal in the world; was aware of it when she stood all afternoon in the stillness of a room bestrewn with linen; was aware of it when she gathered all this linen together and bent down to pack it into the open trousseau chest. All around her the wedding preparations went steadily forward, and from time to time through the stillness in the cool rooms could be heard the grating rasp of the large tailoring scissors. As he sat bowed over his sewing machine rapidly pumping its treadle with his foot, one of the young tailors’ assistants attempted to break this silence. Wholly unexpectedly, he suddenly burst into fullthroated song:

O my beloved!

On a distant road

I take my way.

Later, the solitary rattle of the rapidly stitching machine was all that could be heard—heard at length, hoarsely and angrily, until it was finally silenced. In the opposite corner, a second machine was preparing to start stitching, while through the open window a mild breeze from the town pressed its way in, blew gently on a curtain high, very high up near the ceiling, and called attention to the fact that in the late April weather outdoors the skies were somewhat overcast and that far, far away in the peasants’ little orchards the fruit trees had been in bloom for some time.

Mirel was summoned to the salon for a fitting. There some ten tailors’ apprentices, suddenly forgetting their upraised needles, stared with idiotic popping eyes at her bare shoulders and arms. And in the newly basted dress she stood before the mirror and remembered:

—She, Mirel, had once been someone and had a very strong aversion to something … and now she was nothing and had come down in the world and had absolutely no idea what would become of her in the future, and yet—absurdly enough—she went on fitting these wedding clothes of hers.

Abruptly she grew agitated and annoyed and pushed aside the tailor who’d been begging her to stand straight.

—What kind of excuses was he trying to make, this tailor? The entire shoulder puckered up, and the dress as a whole was ruined.

One afternoon, one of the young seamstresses from the provincial capital was standing on Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s verandah pressing a new silk dress. She repeatedly picked up the hot pressing iron, sprayed the garment with water from her mouth, and heard one sewing machine pick up the rhythm of stitching from another indoors. Far, far away, near the town bridge to the east, the regular beats of the blacksmith’s hammer died slowly away one after the other, and the shtetl fell silent. Suddenly from the same end of town came the jingling of some out-of-town bridle bells, and an unknown hired chaise drew steadily closer. Sitting up in it was a tall, unfamiliar young man who, in driving by, did not let Reb Gedalye’s house out of his sight for a moment. The young woman briefly forgot about the dress she was pressing, followed the chaise with her eyes as far as the farthest peasant orchards, and composed herself:

—Probably a stranger … probably someone just passing through.

A little while later, however, someone calmly came to the house and reported, quietly and phlegmatically:

—Word has it that the guest she’d entertained before Passover had come to visit the midwife again.

At the time, with her face hot and flushed Mirel was standing in front of the mirror with her shoulders bare, trying on another dress.

—Who?—her eyes suddenly opened wide in astonishment—Who do they say has arrived?

Before she’d received any answer, she’d completely forgotten about the master tailor who was kneeling beside her, pinning her garment from all sides. She rapidly stripped off the unfitted dress and snatched up her everyday jacket.

The tailor, vexed beyond endurance, turned to face the two apprentices who were now left with nothing to do because they’d been working on this dress, and wiped his sweating brow.

—Can you believe Mirel’s caprices! … He’d known them for a long time by now, but this time he’d been certain that they’d finish their work by Tuesday evening and would be able to return home very early on Friday.

But Mirel’s lips were trembling as her fingers buttoned up the little collar of her jacket:

—What did he want of her, this tailor? She’d absolutely no idea what he wanted of her.

Rushing from the salon, she began anticipating the arrival of some visitor with great impatience. Every time the outer door banged, she would dash from her bedroom to the dining room and agitatedly send the maid to look in the entrance hall:

—Well? Who? Who’s come in?

By nightfall her mood was downcast and her face forlorn and weary.

No one had come to call on her.

Wrapped in her summer shawl, she sat alone on the steps of the verandah watching the way the setting sun here and there reddened the tops of the thatched roofs. Scheduled to take place somewhere else through that night was the watch that traditionally preceded a circumcision,
*
so from the marketplace a magnum of wine was being carried there. The liquid splashed about inside the demijohn, gleamed in the light of the setting sun, and appeared too clear and red, evoking an image of the house in which this watch was to be held: the laid tables, the shining faces of the Jews who’d sit round them and drink toasts to life. And it evoked also an image of a semidetached peasant cottage situated far beyond the town limits that would be illuminated until very late that night, in which the midwife would be sitting with Herz and with the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan. And even while discussing all manner of subjects, all of them would know what had been written in the letter which she, Mirel, had posted off immediately after Passover. Though not one of them would speak a word about it, each would privately reflect:

—What was there to say about it? … A foolish story about a letter … Really, a very foolish story about a letter that Mirel had written …

Very early the next morning the midwife got hold of a borrowed horse and buggy and drove herself at great speed across the shtetl.

Women saw her at sunrise as they were herding their cows out to pasture.

Soon it was common knowledge:

There’d been drinking all night in the midwife’s little cottage at the end of town. Those taking a full part had been Herz, the midwife herself, her landlady’s son who’d just completed his term of military service, and some teacher or other from a nearby shtetl, a shabby thirty-eight-year-old fellow in a blue peasant blouse who’d once had rabbinical ordination and the daughter of a ritual slaughterer for a wife, but was now in love with a prosperous shopkeeper’s daughter not yet seventeen years of age.

Having drunk too much, Herz had been infuriated that they were trying to discuss Mirel with him, and had said, half in mockery and half in earnest:

—He couldn’t understand what they wanted. She was nothing more than a transitional point in human development, and nothing would come of her. Still, she was a good-looking girl.

During the course of the day, all this was discussed in Reb Gedalye’s house. Someone described the odd impression the midwife had made as she rushed headlong across town in the horse and buggy. Someone else mockingly inquired:

—Please tell us, how old might she be, that midwife?

Searching for something under the mound of linen and clothing around her, Mirel heard this, stopped rummaging for a moment, and fixed a piercing glance on the person speaking.

At dusk she bumped into the midwife in the street. Each young woman stared at the other for a while, had nothing to say, and felt that she hated the other.

Mirel said:

—She’d heard that Herz had come down.

And the midwife smiled maliciously like a tailor’s daughter taking revenge on someone.

—Yes—she said—he’s been here since Sunday.

A pause.

—Will he be staying long?

—A few days.

Another pause.

—Did the midwife know why Herz hadn’t replied to her, Mirel’s, letter?

Then the midwife’s smile grew as spiteful and her laughter as unnatural and poisonous as though Mirel had attempted but failed to snatch something away from her.

—She had no idea why Mirel persisted in running after Herz. He certainly had a great deal more to think about than Mirel and her little letters.

And Mirel stood opposite her, staring her in the face.

She returned home more hurriedly than usual, without being aware of it. In the entrance hall the master tailor said something to her which she didn’t hear. Then she lay for a long time in her room without any consciousness of doing so.

Suddenly she sprang up, rapidly buttoned on her summer overcoat and without glancing at the master tailor who again attempted to stop her she strode rapidly up to the midwife Schatz’s cottage at the end of the town.

When she turned to go back home it was already about ten o’clock at night. With her face aflame she went into her room and stood stockstill there; anxious to remember something, she began interrogating one of the young seamstresses:

—Did the girl perhaps remember what she, Mirel, had been meaning to do that afternoon?

She then went across to the big room farthest away where, with the lamps turned down, the exhausted tailors were dozing in their seats after their day’s work. There she demanded a fitting of the unfinished dress they’d been obliged to put aside because of her earlier conduct, and expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the master tailor who wanted to return alone to the capital the next day. Her face grew very red as she adjusted her corset in front of the mirror and insisted:

—They were leaving for the wedding the following Monday, and she’d trust no one but the master tailor—not even to pack up the clothes.

She required there to be as much fuss as possible around her in the house; she even hurried off to Reb Gedalye in his study, brought him with her, and compelled him on the spot to repeat her own words to the tailors:

—If the tailors were to start working at night as well, they’d get paid more.

All too soon Friday arrived, a beautiful day on which the tailors’ sewing machines finally ceased rattling. Curtains now hung on all the windows, and in great haste the house was tidied for the last time.

This was the Sabbath eve immediately preceding the wedding.
*

At about three in the afternoon outside Reb Gedalye’s house stood two large peasant wagons to which the tailors were hurriedly tying their sewing machines and dressmakers’ dummies. While they were busy, the preoccupied Reb Gedalye himself arrived from the great Kashperivke woods, smiling cheerfully at all the shtetl. Climbing down from his buggy, he displayed great largesse, demonstrating to the tailors here on the freshly washed steps of his own verandah that he was still in a position to pay handsomely for his daughter’s trousseau. His face shone with happiness, and, setting off immediately for the bathhouse in his still-harnessed buggy, he did not forget to stop and pick up Avreml the rabbi on the way there.

People stood about in the marketplace watching the tailors clamber hastily into the wagons and whip their horses into a gallop down the road toward the provincial capital, smiling good-naturedly at their efforts:

—Those tailors will gallop off into the Sabbath, so they will.

—They’ll definitely be whipping their way into the Sabbath for a good few hours.

Afterward great silence reigned both in the shtetl and in Reb Gedalye’s tidy house.

Rose-colored curtains hung at the windows, velvet runners lay on the floors, all yearning for an absent joy.

A runner lay stretched out to its full length on the spotless floor of the salon, deeply envious of some other runner lying somewhere far away in some other house, one that had also been neatly tided in honor of an imminent wedding.

—In that other house, the bride is happy—this runner seemed to be thinking.

The long curtain at the window stirred ever so slightly, seemingly ready to add sadly:

—She loves the bridegroom, that bride in the other house.

And Mirel still stood in front of the small mirror in her room, dressing very plainly, as on every other Sabbath.

Silence filled the surrounding rooms; a longing for the life of an only child that was now on the verge of expiring made itself felt, and there was not the slightest desire to think about Shmulik, who, in a suburb of the distant metropolis, was preparing himself for the same wedding as she. In any case, the whole of this marriage was nothing more than a charade, temporary and provisional. More than at any other time she was convinced of this, now on this Sabbath of the week preceding the wedding ceremony; she felt as she felt on every day of every week of every year; and as though this were any ordinary Friday, she even went out to buy something at the pharmacy.

Walking alone along the street that led into the shtetl, she reflected that she was lonely, was somehow stubbornly inured to this loneliness, and needed no one now, no one at all; from time to time she still brooded that her life lacked some central, overriding purpose, but a moment later she no longer believed either in herself or in this supposedly overriding purpose, looked at life around her, and realized that no one believed.

And suddenly she flushed and remembered that she’d written the selfsame words in the letter to which Herz hadn’t replied. Hurrying up the steps of the pharmacy, she was deeply vexed at herself.

—What a ridiculous letter … Who needed a letter like that?

A little while later, when she emerged from the pharmacy, the distant flame-red sun hung low on the western horizon like a great golden coin, and standing alone on the outskirts of the shtetl, poised to receive the Sabbath was Herz. As always, the green glint twinkled in his small, deeply set eyes as, bending forward, he looked attentively at those Jews who’d just returned from the bathhouse and were standing about here and there next to their widely opened front doors preparing to welcome the Sabbath in the synagogue. With his face wholly steeped in the glow of the setting sun, he appeared to be made of gold. Noticing Mirel, he took several steps toward her and directed her attention to the shtetl: