The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (34 page)

—She didn’t know; she’d see.

But later that same day, around one o’clock in the afternoon when the unanticipated hired buggy drove up to the outskirts of the shtetl, a blast of bygone despair from the old, familiar melancholy houses struck her, and she was overwhelmed with the everyday desolation of her girlhood, as though she’d never left this place and hadn’t returned to it now.

The entire insignificant, poverty-stricken little shtetl with all its old, familiar, impoverished, and scattered houses seemed to have been frozen into a single never-ending, all-pervasive thought:

—There was no way to reverse the misfortune … And there was no one on whom to build any hope …

And there, a little farther down, already peering out from behind the marketplace was her father’s house with its verandah; as always, the house stood there in sorrowful loneliness, still telling everyone who passed its façade:

—She’s has been married o. now, has Mirel … She’s over there now, in a suburb of the metropolis, is Mirel …

No one came to see her, and no one rejoiced at her arrival. No changes had taken place in the house. Gitele had merely started wearing every day the ritual wig she’d previously kept only for Sabbaths, and her jewelry was still missing. When she first caught sight of Mirel, she rose slowly, very slowly, from her chair at the round table, flushed, and barely smiled:

—Just look—she said with quiet diffidence—it’s Mirele …

For some reason she still clutched the top of the round table on which she leaned both her hands. Evidently she found very odd both Mirel’s sudden and unexpected arrival and the fact that for the entire three and a half months during which Mirel had lived in the suburb of the metropolis, no one had heard a single word from her; Shmulik alone had added a formal greeting in Hebrew on her behalf in each of his letters.

—My dear wife Mirel, long may she live, sends you her regards.

Without thinking, it seemed, Gitele added:

—Mirele’s looks hadn’t improved at all.

And in a little while she took the compresses from the servant girl and went off to the bedroom to apply them to Reb Gedalye, who’d recently suffered a recurrence of the previous winter’s illness.

Fully dressed, he lay there on one of the two old single wooden beds.
*
Without groaning, he held the tin compress close to his belly.

—I’m lying down now—he said to Mirel, smiling in some embarrassment—but earlier today I was walking about.

His face was yellow and he looked more ill than usual, while his smile no longer suited the sharpness of his nose.

For some reason, a glance at him prompted the thought that he wasn’t fated to live much longer, that his voice had changed to resemble that of someone who’d already been summoned to heaven and been shown the severe judgment inscribed against his name in the Book of Life:

—Look here: you will die … When?—That’s not for you to know.

At sundown, when his pain had abated, he rose from his bed and gave instructions for the buggy to be harnessed so he could ride out to the Kashperivke woods where he needed to be. Having donned his dust coat in readiness to leave, he went up to Mirel and, revolving something in his mind, stood for a little while before her with his head bowed.

Outdoors the harnessed buggy was already waiting for him, and Gitele was no longer in the room.

Quite possibly he was troubled by the thought that while he ought to give his visiting daughter some kind of gift, he no longer had the means to do so.

Suddenly he asked her:

—How was she getting along? He meant how was she getting along with Shmulik? He was surely not a bad husband …

But evidently he seemed to feel that this wasn’t what he wanted to say to her and, overcome with embarrassment, he again bowed his head and lost himself briefly in thought before finally pulling himself together:

—Well! Let’s get on our way.

For some reason, soon after his departure the taciturn Gitele slowly and quietly began speaking:

She related that the Kashperivke wood had turned out to be far from the bargain it was initially thought to be; that as they no longer had any work for him, Reb Gedalye’s relative, their bookkeeper, had taken a position with some merchant partners in the provincial capital:

—Yes, well, he’d always been a capable, devoted, and considerate employee. Velvl Burnes specifically invited him to come and work for his father and offered him a salary of a thousand rubles a year … Gedalye and I urged him to take it … And Avreml the rabbi also told him he was mad not to accept … Well, he’s a stubborn man and didn’t want to.

After this confidence, they drank tea and had nothing more to talk about. Later Mirel stood for some time alone near the front door, gazing out at the shtetl.

As always, everything there was desolate and sunk in penitential dejection. In the late twilight the teacher Poliye, who’d taught there two years before, was on her way to visit the midwife Schatz who lived in the village, as were the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan and the crippled student Lipkis … The shtetl was dark and cold and a gust of wind drove the dust from the marketplace. Velvl Burnes already knew that she’d arrived and had therefore driven off very early to spend the night on his farm. Only in the big Sadagura prayer house, which peered out through its illuminated windows from a side alley opposite, was there any sign of life: there Jews in penitential depression swayed in the traditional manner as they recited the evening prayers, shouting aloud in great sorrow after the cantor:

—A psalm of David!

Newly awakened from a refreshing afternoon nap, a stocky young man with coarse, unfamiliar features and the appearance of a would-be intellectual, evidently a new teacher at the Talmud Torah, passed close by in the gloom of the chill early evening. His powerful body shivered with cold and he had pleasure in thinking:

—There’d be light and warmth at his destination; a lamp would be burning on the table that held the welcoming glasses of tea, and there would be joking and laughter.

But to Mirel, everything appeared nugatory and stupid. It was stupid to have pinned her hopes on someone all the time she was traveling here. It was stupid that gathered together now in the midwife Schatz’s Gentile-owned cottage were the very same people who’d gathered there two years before; stupid that they were presently talking about the very same things they’d talked about last year. All of them—the midwife, Poliye, Safyan, and Lipkis—all were discontented with their lives, but none of them did anything to reconstruct those lives. There were many such people in the world, and all of them were now coming together to pass the evening in illuminated houses in various towns and villages, and afterward all of them returned to their homes where they went on doing those things they’d done the day before, things that had been repugnant to many people before them.

And in the end … now in this chill twilight that was enfolding the whole world …

—In the end, there had to be others who were trying to do something different.

When she went back indoors, the hanging lamp on its pulley had long been lit in the dining room, and Libke the rabbi’s wife had long been sitting there, smiling at the taciturn Gitele and making some worldly wise, married woman’s remark about Mirel’s condition:

—Is that so, indeed?

Disgusted and oppressed, Mirel went into what had formerly been her own room opposite the dark salon, stopped inside, and contemplated it by the light of the lamp she was carrying. Everything in there was so fusty: the tables uncovered, the air as chilly as though it were winter outdoors but the stove hadn’t been heated for a whole month; in the empty closet hung one of the dresses she’d left behind with a short, shabby autumn jacket padded with cotton-wool. The bed wasn’t made up, but loosely covered in such a way that the pillows and the featherbed poked out from under the blanket. And for some reason it seemed to her much easier to be eternally a homeless wanderer than ever to lie down in that bed again.

She found it difficult to remain in there. Returning to the dining room, she sat down at the table with her head in both hands, thought for a while, and then suddenly began inquiring about trains to the metropolis:

—Two trains used to go from here … She didn’t know which one would be more sensible for her to take in order to return home the next day—the one in the morning or the one in the evening?

With a smile, Gitele posed an astonished question. The rabbi’s wife added a remark. Mirel heard nothing; she was still staring straight ahead of her.

—So she’d be going back to the suburb of the metropolis the next day …

This journey of hers had been a total failure. She found it impossible to spend more time than was absolutely necessary here in this house. She had now to find some way to save her life entirely on her own. And if she were now returning to the suburb, it wouldn’t be for long, in any event … she was only going back for a short while.

Two days later she returned to the suburb, late at night when everyone was already asleep. She looked unwell, as though she were recovering from an illness, spoke to no one, lay fully clothed on her bed, and did not leave the house for several days. Some books in Shmulik’s study which she’d carried into her bedroom one by one were scattered around the bed on which she lay. Now she had nothing against Shmulik: he could make her neither better nor worse. She was simply firm in her determination to leave him as soon as possible. She could not endure his occasional lingering about in her room, however, never looked at him, and never replied if he spoke to her.

Shmulik knew that the doctors had despaired of her father’s life; Avreml the rabbi had communicated this information to him in a letter. In her own house, his mother was dumbfounded and wholly unable to comprehend:

—How can this be? When a father is dangerously ill, how can a daughter not bring herself to spend at least a few days with him?

When he tried to speak to Mirel about this for the third time, she grew agitated and interrupted him:

—She didn’t know … she didn’t know …

Tears rose to Shmulik’s eyes then, and he drifted over to the window in the dining room where he stood for some time, staring out with these tear-filled eyes at the overcast scene outdoors. He was deeply upset, and his mind was a blank. In this distracted state he went across to his father in the big house where something in his troubled expression excited comment, so his mother discreetly drew him aside:

—What’s the matter, Shmulik? Is there something new wrong again?

But downhearted as he was, he assumed the expression of a grave and serious-minded adult and even frowned in displeasure:

—No, who says that? … No … Nothing …

He went directly to his father’s study where three employees from different stables were discussing the possibilities of taking another drove of oxen to Warsaw. When his father sought his opinion, he had no idea what was being asked of him, and responded:

—Eh?

In the dining room of the mother-in-law’s house one afternoon during the intermediate days of Sukkot
*
the family had gathered to drink tea round the long table, covered with its white cloth. Because of the festival, almost all their relatives from the city were present, all cheerful and deliberately blocking out every thought of Mirel. It occurred only to his mother that all was not well with Shmulik, but she was so dull-witted that she soon forgot about this and began foolishly blinking her eyes.

Also seated at the table was the former student Miriam Lyubashits, cradling in her arms a six-month-old baby, a blonde little girl with uncovered head, eyes like bits of blue glass, and a damp, pouting upper lip. Only fifteen minutes before, almost the entire household had been fussing round this infant. Every member in turn had snatched her up to dance round with her and lift her high up into the air, and the frightened child had stared at all this with her eyes like bits of blue glass, frequently whimpering. The mother-in-law had then taken the baby in her arms and, blinking her eyes, had started talking to her, whereupon the child had wrinkled up her little snub nose, poked out her little tongue, and begun smiling merrily. Everyone had been utterly charmed, and Miriam Lyubashits had announced:

—Do you all see? … She loves her auntie already.

Now silence had descended on the dining room. All the relatives had moved into the salon and the child lay in Miriam’s arms. Dribbling, the little one raked her weak little fists over her mother’s face, emitting a piercing yell that carried across the hushed room, as though her mother’s face were a windowpane and the child were stubbornly determined to smash it. Turning her face to one side as though afraid of a blow from these little fists, the mother tried her best to answer her aunt’s question:

—What’s there to think about? Mirel certainly can’t be regarded as a normal person.

Almost all the chairs around the table were unoccupied and the children were playing noisily in an adjoining room. The mother-in-law peered round to check that no one could overhear what she said, asked someone to shut the door that led into the passage, and moved closer to Miriam:

—Who can speak of “normal” now?

And the former student listened in silence to the mother-in-law’s complaints and shared her opinion that there was no question of any normality here:

—Because, after all, take her, Miriam Lyubashits herself, for example. Dear Lord … here she was—she also lived with a husband!

Miriam rose, gave the baby to the elderly Gentile wet nurse, and set off home. All the way to the streetcar stop, the mother-in-law, who was accompanying her, expatiated on her complaints:

—And another thing: what does she want of Shmulik? Does she want a divorce? If she wants a divorce, let her say so …

Outdoors was cloudy and drizzling. Alone, Mirel stood in the window with a shawl over her head watching the two of them with sadness in her eyes.

Suddenly they stopped and saw:

Descending from the streetcar that had just arrived from the city was Montchik Zaydenovski. Preoccupied, carrying two large bundles of books under his arms, he passed by without noticing them. One book fell from under his left arm, and an unknown woman walking behind him shouted out loudly after him: