The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (33 page)

—To be sure, he, Montchik, met hundreds of merchants every single day, but why couldn’t he recognize people any longer?

Late one evening a few days later, Mirel again traveled into town with Montchik and, walking down the central avenue with him, recognized Nosn Heler waiting for them at a deserted intersection in the distance. In his broadly cut autumn cloak he stood there on his own, looking unhappy and staring directly at Mirel.

In order to avoid encountering him, she immediately led the abstracted Montchik across the road to the sidewalk opposite and took him into an overcrowded, noisy café where from nightfall on the clatter of plates had been competing fiercely against the screeching tunes of the strident orchestra. But when she left the place at midnight with Montchik, the young man in the autumn cloak was still standing opposite the café and, as before, was staring directly at her. Recognizing him, she actually trembled and pressed herself close to Montchik as though in fear:

—Could Montchik understand why that man over there was staring so?

For a moment Montchik roused himself from his commercial cogitations but failed to understand her question. He glanced around abstractedly but noticed nothing. Walking at her side, he soon lost himself in thought over the molasses factory in Kuropoliye, which was doing badly and was about to be sold:

—The week before he’d succeeded in bringing together the Kuropoliye shareholders and the buyers … If their director weren’t such a swine and bribe-taker, something positive might come out of all this the following week.

Suddenly he stopped and pressed two fingers to his frowning forehead:

—Just a moment … For the life of him, he couldn’t remember whether or not he’d signed the telegram he’d sent to the director earlier that day!

He felt distinctly uneasy and glanced at Mirel with an expression of great pleading, as though he desperately needed her compassion:

—Mirel had to excuse him. He had to slip into the nearby telegraph office for a moment to make an inquiry.

Mirel led him to the telegraph office herself, and there roundly rebuked him for his unwillingness to leave her outside on her own:

—What was Montchik making a performance for? … He was to go into the telegraph office that instant. She’d find her way home without him.

All the time she was talking to Montchik, and subsequently when she was left alone on the deserted sidewalk looking around her, she was drawn to Nosn Heler. The man himself was still standing at the intersection following her with his eyes. He wanted nothing; he was simply unhappy—and he followed her with his eyes.

Suddenly she turned in the direction of the suburb in which she lived and swiftly seated herself in a droshky.
*

She was annoyed at the sentiment that drew her to him, at herself for continuing to drift about in the Zaydenovskis’ house, and at the fact that not a single useful thing had come from anything she’d ever done in her life.

—She needed some means of freeing herself from Shmulik and couldn’t find it.

—She’d been wandering about all over town with Montchik for several days now and had been considering asking him about such means, yet this was totally uncalled for and stupid … Because Montchik … Montchik was Shmulik’s near relation and loved him. And apart from that …

—What could he possibly tell her about this?

Unaware that she’d crossed the bridge leading to her suburb and had reached the farthermost street on which she lived, she suddenly noticed that all the windows of her house, except those of the bedroom, were brightly lit, boasting to the midnight darkness outdoors:

—We have guests, guests, guests.

Astonished, she peered in through these illuminated windows:

—Perhaps her father or her mother … She’d not written them a single letter since her marriage.

But while she was still in the passageway, after the maid had locked the front door behind her, she soon noticed that nothing untoward had occurred and that there were no guests: only Shmulik, after a month of tiring travel from Warsaw, had returned home. By coming back so oddly unannounced and somewhat self-consciously, he showed that he knew: no particular pleasure awaited him here.

His hair and beard had been newly and closely cut, as though the next day were the eve of Passover. The new light-colored suit he wore had been made in Warsaw; his new shoes squeaked. All in all, he looked as pristine, animated, and fresh as though he’d only just come from the bathhouse, as though during the time he’d spent in his distillery and in Warsaw he’d taken pains with himself and curbed many of his boyish mannerisms.

Mirel passed through the dining room without glancing at him, shaming him in the eyes of their oxen buyer, a grizzled, grimy old man who sat at the table with stick in hand and eyes inflamed and damaged, exuding the pungent stench of snuff and goat flesh. Mortified, Shmulik looked down and began chewing on a matchstick. Tears sprang to his eyes.

Mirel was now in the brightly lit salon, where she took off her jacket, not knowing why she hadn’t gone directly from the dining room to her unlit bedroom. She tried without success to recall something but remembered only that Shmulik was next door. For some reason she started putting on her jacket again, but immediately removed it and once more passed straight through the dining room to her dark bedroom. There, without taking off her close-fitting silk blouse or tightly laced corset, she immediately lay down on the bed. Hiding her face in both her hands, she began preparing herself for what would soon take place:

—An end … Now an end must come …

Through the silence that reigned in all the surrounding rooms came the sounds of Shmulik pacing slowly across the dining room, the dirty oxen dealer expressing his pleasure at the few thousand rubles’ profit that would now accrue to him as his small commission, and his continued amazement at the extraordinarily buoyant market Shmulik had found:

—The like of such a market, he might venture to say, hadn’t been seen since Napoleon’s time … Could Shmulik believe it? Seven rubles a pood! …

His diseased eyes watered under their inflamed lids. Oblivious of the tears running down his cheeks and in places into his grizzled, dirty, yellowing beard, he stuffed tobacco into his nose and raised his smiling face somewhat higher, like a blind man in a daydream. He was visualizing another such profitable market:

—So if Shmulik really wanted to go to Warsaw again straight after Sukkot,
*
the eighteen heifers from Popivke would have to be left in the Stolin stables … Also the seven from Yelizavet that were housed near the door … Yes, and the frisky one as well, the one with the big horns … Here was a funny thing: three of them had been there for nearly three and a half months but they hadn’t put on any weight … He’d taken a feel of them there the other week … Yes … No weight to speak of … He disliked oxen like that.

The old man finally left, and Shmulik locked the door behind him. The silence was now total, as in the dead of night. All that could be heard was Shmulik pacing slowly across the dining room, the squeaking of his new shoes disclosing something about their owner’s great heaviness of heart, about the fact that he was now thinking of Mirel lying in bed in her darkened room, that he loved her, wanted to go to her, but couldn’t and didn’t know how; that he felt unhappy, and that this unhappiness would never ever leave him:

—For example here he was, home after an absence of four weeks …

He’d earned a considerable sum of money … He was becoming a very wealthy man … He’d bought and brought home for Mirel blouses and other gifts, thinking they would please her … And his thoughts had taken him even further:

—When he returned home after having been away for six weeks, she’d start speaking to him again …

He was still chewing the matchstick, and there were still tears in his eyes:

—Mirel considered him a fool.

He saw her fresh, sweet-smelling face vividly before him. Now she was lying on her bed in the dark adjoining room with her eyes shut. Perhaps she was already asleep in there, or perhaps not. He knew:

Were he to approach her now, he’d have nothing to say. Yet he went in all the same, slowly, step by step, stopping every few moments, never raising his bowed head, always bearing in mind:

—Mirel considered him a fool.

He crossed the threshold of the darkened room and stopped. The glow from the lights in the dining room reached in here; on the bed opposite, her figure took shape, a slender, lissome figure tightly sheathed in its narrow black dress. Slowly, infinitely slowly, with his head bowed, he went up to her: first one step, then stopping, then another step. Now he saw her face: positioned a little downward, high on the pillow, eyelids shut. For a while he stood beside the bed, his own eyes downcast.

Knowing that he ought to turn back, he nevertheless moved still closer, noticed her partially outstretched hand drooping over the side of the bed, and quietly took hold of it.

Quietly, very quietly, he stood holding her hand, and just as quietly began to weep.

She did not take her hand from his. He heard her speak. As though half-asleep, she sighed and said, softly and tonelessly:

—Why do you need me, Shmulik?

He sat down on the bed then, and began sobbing. He kissed her hand. Again and again he kissed her hand. She neither opened her eyes nor said anything. He moved closer and embraced her. Still she did not open her eyes and still she said nothing. And for a short while, farther away in the kitchen, the servant girl awoke from a deep sleep. Her bare feet slapping over the floor, she went from room to room extinguishing the lamps.

The day after Rosh Hashanah, when Shmulik had driven off to the distillery for a few hours, Mirel packed some things into her yellow leather valise and prepared to go home to her father.

She said not a word about this to anyone and stuck doggedly to her predetermined plan:

—Now everything was definitely coming to an end … She’d free herself of the Zaydenovskis.

The oppressive atmosphere of the Fast of Gedalye
*
hung heavy in her mother-in-law’s dining room. In his expansive, self-congratulatory manner, the master of the house sat at the head of the table entertaining a female relative of some wealth who was passing through with her scholarly husband. She stayed too long and spoke too loudly with an unmistakably provincial inflection.

The conversation touched on Aunt Pearl in Warsaw who, according to Shmulik, had enjoyed a very good year; on Aunt Esther here in town whose situation in life, might she be spared the Evil Eye, was even more comfortable now than it had been while her husband was still alive and who traveled abroad every summer; on the fact that Montchik, who supported her, had been born in the very year in which Uncle Ezriel-Meir had lost his first wife, and that, although he was now twenty-six years old and earned very well, Montchik was in no haste to marry and never spoke of it.

Suddenly a member of the household came in to whisper Mirel’s secret plan into the mother-in-law’s ear; she in turn whispered it immediately to her husband, staring challengingly into his face and blinking her eyes in a peculiar manner. For the last few days Shmulik had looked very happy. On the afternoon of the second day of Rosh Hashanah he’d been seen standing with Mirel in the sunshine on the steps of the verandah, and as a result the mother-in-law had had even gone so far as to canvass the opinion of Miriam Lyubashits:

—According to Miriam’s sense of justice, which of them should now be the first to get back on speaking terms with the other, eh? Surely it behooved Mirele to make the first approach, eh?

With her shawl over her shoulders, the mother-in-law hurried over to Mirel’s wing and there began warily to initiate a conversation, first with the servant girl and presently, even more warily, with Mirel herself:

—Are you going away for long, Mirele?

And more:

—Perhaps you’ll wait until Shmulik gets back?

With an expression of grave inflexibility on her face, Mirel busied herself with her two pieces of luggage, began rapidly pulling on her overcoat, sent out for a droshky, and answered her mother-in-law’s questions brusquely and to the point:

—She didn’t know.

—She’d see.

—She couldn’t wait.

Her mind was now so firmly set on carrying out her plan that she surprised even herself:

—She could’ve done this simple thing a month before, even two months before … What had she been thinking of all that time?

During the entire eighteen-hour train trip she felt as light and fresh as though all her past and present hopes depended exclusively upon this journey, as though from this moment on she were beginning to live anew, totally anew. She took excessive pleasure in standing for half hours on end at the clean, wide window of the second-class carriage looking out on unfamiliar cottages, on unknown fields and vistas adorned with orchards and coppices that rapidly revealed themselves to the speeding train and were just as rapidly left behind. At the same time, she recalled her own blue eyes, looking out with great sadness from under their long black lashes, and was alive to the fact that she, this tall, slender young woman clad in black, was now free and on her own among these travelers with their unfamiliar faces, all of whom gazed at her with intense curiosity each time she was obliged to pass by close to them, who made way for her with great respect yet dared not engage her in conversation. A blond man sitting opposite her, who’d been uninterruptedly devouring the pages of a book in German with keen interest, at length fixed his eyes on her for quite some time and then politely inquired:

—Hadn’t he met her two years before in Italy?

At a large station where for a full half hour the dust-blanketed train stopped to draw breath, she attracted the prolonged attention of a tall, wealthy Christian, a hunter who carried a double-barreled shotgun slung over his shoulder. He hovered near the table at which she was breakfasting and finally sat down directly opposite her to drink his tea.

On the second day of her trip, in the buggy that was transporting her from her final stop, all this still came to mind together with vague, undefined thoughts about a new life and a sense that she’d done well to answer the probing of Shmulik and her mother-in-law with cold imprecision: