The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (31 page)

—The night before he’d stood next to her bed in his underwear and for a long time had been unwilling to move away … Now he was ashamed to look her in the face and would therefore be in no haste to return from the distillery.

Presently she returned to the dining room, wrapped herself in her shawl, and lay down on the sofa. So much heaviness and disgust on her soul left her feeling as though her heart had been snatched out and steeped in filth. From under the overcast skies outdoors a bleak new Sunday stared in, spreading its single tedious thought all around:

—A new week … a bleak week … a dreary week.

A dull ache gripped the back of her head all the way down her neck in consequence of the agitated, sleepless night she’d passed. The pain was weak and ill-defined, as with the onset of typhus, her eyelids drooped of their own accord, and in her drowsy, fuddled consciousness confused thoughts came and went, merging the sound of the chopper that echoed from the kitchen with reflections on her own lost life, the dull pain in the back of her head, and an awareness that she’d lie here on the sofa for a long, long time:

—She’d lie dozing here all day.

Drifting in and out of sleep on the sofa there, she started awake, noticed the table laid, rose, and attempted to eat something, but finding herself unable to do so, lay down and dozed off again, opening her eyes only toward sunset to see:

An ill wind had blown in a young man, a synagogue cantor who was passing through, a tall, thin fellow in a short, worn little surtout with a dirty paper collar and a tuning fork in his pouch. Speaking with a nasal drawl, he inquired after Shmulik as after an influential trustee of a synagogue:

—In general, did Madame know when the Master would return?

—
Ponimayete-li
, was it Madame’s understanding that the Master would return for the Sabbath?

She felt not the slightest obligation to spend time being bored in his company, to inhale the stench of rotting salted fish that he diffused around himself, or to keep answering him in exactly the same way she’d answered him before:

—I don’t know.

—No.

—I don’t know.

Earlier, under his very eyes, she’d attempted to air the room and had opened all the windows in the hope that this hint would help. But since he still refused to budge, she finally left him on his own there, went outdoors, and seated herself on the steps of the verandah.

Slowly, very slowly, the darkness of early evening drew on, spreading silence over the scattered houses on the sandy outskirts of the suburb. By now there were no longer any passersby, and the air was utterly still. Somewhere far away, near the barn stacked with bales of straw situated opposite the church’s large courtyard, a threshing machine worked on the priest’s dried-out grain as night fell. To the left, between the father-in-law’s trees where a little earlier a horde of relatives had appeared to see Sholem Zaydenovski on his way, the mother-in-law could be heard thrashing one of her little boys. The child could be heard struggling and screaming, and as she struck the blows the mother-in-law went on and on repeating in her hoarse, dull-witted voice:

—One dared not speak about a mother that way … One dared not speak about a mother that way … That wasn’t the way to speak about a mother.

The screams of the weeping child evoked a clear picture of the way she was holding the boy bent over her knee and peering shortsightedly at the place she was beating. This prompted the thought that this tall, stupid woman was utterly without understanding, had no idea of how to treat children, and ruined them as a result; that in exactly the same way some fifteen or sixteen years before she’d thrashed Shmulik, the man who was currently her husband, and had yelled at him too, exactly as she was doing now:

—One dared not speak to a mother that way … One dared not speak to a mother that way …

For this reason, because there was now no doubt that Shmulik basically needed a wife who would thrash his children just as his mother had thrashed him, she suddenly felt relieved of a heavy burden, and her light heart was suddenly filled with the half-forgotten hope:

—Wait! … Nothing at all bound her to him, to Shmulik, or to this house, and she, Mirel … she could leave whenever she chose.

Now all she needed was to devise a plan.

An event that had taken place in the provincial capital some years before came to mind:

A stubborn, uncommunicative young wife, a daughter-in-law of the wealthy Dizhur family, had left her accustomed place early one morning, had spoken no word either to her husband or to her parents-in-law before her departure, and had never returned again.

This was soon known all over the city, and in well-to-do homes jokes were made:

—Never mind, she’ll come back … With God’s help, she’ll show up for a meal one Sabbath or another.

But the young wife did not return, and to this day no trace of her could be found … No one knew what had become of her … But knowing this had now become an absolute necessity for her, Mirel … She’d work it out:

—Where might this young wife have got to?

Sending not the slightest information about himself, Shmulik stayed on at the distillery from which he was preparing to travel to Warsaw with the herd of oxen he’d acquired before Passover. In this connection, the overseer of the oxen stables, Reb Bunem, came to town. He was a short, stocky little man with a very red neck whose clothes were always greasy: he wore a long caftan in summer, and made it a habit never to forget what his employer had told him. He’d brought along a number of stable lanterns for repair, and purchased a great many short lengths of rope together with several pood
*
of rock salt for the oxen to lick on the road. Carrying in with him the smell of the distillery’s fermenting mash, he also called at the house, found Mirel lying alone on the sofa, and delivered the message with which he’d been charged:

—The young master said to give him the ledger from before Pesach, that’s what he said.

Mirel heard him out without making the slightest movement from her place, and sent him o. to the kitchen.

There the maid, apparently under the impression that what was wanted was some sort of vessel used only for Passover preparations, stared at him wide-eyed:

—How was she supposed to know, since she hadn’t been in service here before Passover? … He’d better ask the coachman Theodor in the courtyard.

The little man wandered up and down in the courtyard for so long that he was finally summoned to the old master in the big house who demanded to know:

—What? Hadn’t the young mistress handed over the ledger yet?

With her shawl over her shoulders, the mother-in-law finally went over in person to Mirel’s house, rummaged about among the books in the study closet until she found the one she was looking for, peered into it with her shortsighted eyes, and read over the first line, which was written in Hebrew, with the delivery of someone reading from the Women’s Bible:
^†

—Statement of account for oxen purchased during the months of Shevat, Adar, and Nisan.
^†

—Here, take it—she said to the overseer in a deliberately loud voice, and left without turning to Mirel. Beside herself with indignation, she went back to her own house and began casting infuriated glances at her husband’s study, where he was dealing with some businessmen. She restrained herself from speaking during the midday meal, waiting until Yankev-Yoysef went off to lie down in their bedroom, whereupon she sat down next to him near the bed and began whispering to him as quietly as though someone were strangling her:

—Do you understand? I mean, what kind of wife is she for Shmulik, for pity’s sake?

—Yes, and all the things she does … And all her trips to that fine cousin of hers, God help us … And the fact that I have to run her house for her, and try to remember that her ceilings have to be repainted … What’s the meaning of it? I even have to send out her chickens to be slaughtered.

The powerful, dark-haired master of the house, who had the crafty eyes of a thief, lay on the bed in his white shirtsleeves smoking his cigarette in silence, frequently glancing warily at the door as though afraid that someone was eavesdropping. He made her no reply. He’d apparently resolved long before that Shmulik had chosen badly and wished to bring all discussion about it to an end as soon as possible. But she, that shortsighted dolt, was still quite unable to calm herself, continually blinked her eyes and whisperingly came to a decision:

—Nothing makes any impression on her … It’s clear enough what would’ve happened if she’d made her match with other people … But she’s made it with us … And Shmulik’s as peace-loving as a dove … So there’s nothing to do … We have to grin and bear it! Keep quiet … as though we’ve seen nothing.

A few days later the mother-in-law went into Mirel’s house with two house painters whom she’d engaged. Paying no attention to Mirel, who was lying on the sofa, she took the workmen from one room to another, pointing out the ceilings to them:

—D’you see? After the furniture’s been moved out into the dining room, the ceiling in the study must be painted first; then the dining room furniture must be moved into the study and the dining room ceiling attended to.

Without turning round, the mother-in-law took herself off and the artisans immediately carried all the study furniture into the dining room and set to work.

Very soon the house began to stink of oil paint and a mixture of ochre and English lamp-black.
*
The disorder grew from day to day. The disarranged rooms were cleaned neither during the day nor at night while the house painters went on doing their jobs, slowly covering one ceiling after another.

They were by no means old men, these two Jewish workmen. They wore embroidered shirts under their paint-stained overalls, and the devil made sure that girls were still beguiled by them and by the work they did. All day the two of them stood on their makeshift scaffolding drawing lines with their rulers, applying paint with their brushes, deriving pleasure from their labor and whistling sad journeyman melodies to accompany it.

A while later, one of the painters had occasion to pass through the adjoining room to collect some necessary piece of equipment and noticed something. Returning to his work fairly excited, he looked round carefully to make sure no one but his companion was there, and asked him with a suggestive wink:

—The mistress of the house isn’t bad-looking, eh?

He kept her in mind all the time he was seated on the high scaffolding, smoking cigarettes and sharing one of his schoolboy stories with his companion:

—When was this? … It must’ve been about eight years ago … At the time we were working in the administrative village
^†
of Kloki and the master of the house had a young daughter-in-law, a sly, frisky little thing she was.

In the disarranged room next door, Mirel went on lying on the sofa in her wide, low-cut dressing-gown with its bell-shaped sleeves, wrapped herself in her thin shawl, and conjured up images of various places to which she might travel once she’d left this house:

—Wherever that might be, nowhere could be worse than here.

All around her stood the beds, both wardrobes with their mirrored doors and the armchairs from the salon together with the huge washtub from which the sodden floor-rag hadn’t been removed for days on end. Everything here resembled a bizarre Passover eve that had fallen in the middle of the month of Elul.
*
All that afternoon the surrounding air had been gloomy and overcast, the thoughts in her mind hazy and confused, and this day seemed to be taking place not in the present but five or six years earlier.

On top of all this came the episode with the book: the arrival in the post of Herz’s new book in Hebrew which reeked of new paper, of fresh printers’ ink, and of the unknown young man himself.

One day the postman had delivered it to the in-laws’ house with the rest of the mail. Everyone there had clustered around it, as afraid as if it were a living thing. Someone noticed something in the firm masculine hand in which the address had been written:

—Just a minute … Shmulik’s name’s been deliberately omitted from the address.

And more:

—What else could be expected? Didn’t they all know well enough that, from girlhood on, young women like Mirel always had to have young male admirers?

Regarded by everyone as the surreptitiously discarded, living fruit of a sin Mirel and someone else had committed together, the book lay on the table for a long time without anyone knowing what to do with it:

—Shouldn’t we send it to Mirel before Yankev-Yosl comes home?

When they did eventually send it to her, she became strangely agitated and confused. She dressed quickly and set off to the telegraph office but almost immediately turned back and sent her maid over to her mother-in-law’s house with clear instructions:

—She was to ask for a letter over there, did she understand? A letter ought to have come, she was to say, together with the book.

From then on there was much putting of heads together at secret meetings in the mother-in-law’s house.

—There was nothing else to be done. In the end they’d have to discuss this with Shmulik and convince him that this was no life for him.

All understood:

No one dared tell him outright that what had taken place between himself and Mirel that Saturday night was common knowledge; everyone understood this. Hence a suitably diplomatic intermediary was sought who could be sent to the distillery, and great reliance was placed on the advice of the former student Miriam:

—Perhaps Miriam’s right … Perhaps the best person is young Lyubashits, the student?

One evening, just before sunset, the young student Lyubashits returned from the distillery covered with dust. He wore the smile of one who out of the goodness of his heart had discharged an errand that was improper for him, and he related, in the private room into which he was led:

—Yes, he’d discussed the matter with Shmulik there.

Almost all the adult members of the household, with the mother-in-law and the former student Miriam at their head, were gathered around. Care was taken to prevent eavesdropping, all the little children were chased away, and everyone hung on his every word: