The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (38 page)

For three whole days, Mirel suffered alone in her room, was conscious all that time of the place below her breast, felt intense aversion to it, and finally began calling on her mother-in-law in the big house once again.

On her way there, she kept reflecting that she ought to say something, and so put an end to something. But every time she went in, the will to speak deserted her, and her hatred toward that place below her breast intensified within her. Her patience was taxed by her mother-in-law’s repeated “Sit, Mirele,” by Miriam Lyubashits and her child, by the younger Lyubashits’s ruddy face and tedious intellectualizing. As the disgust within her grew, it seemed to her that it had become a physical thing that could literally be seized; that she might all at once rip it from her, and would then grow light and wholesome once again.

Leaving her mother-in-law’s house, she went into town, called twice at her cousin Ida Shpolianski’s apartment but did not find her in, and returning home, lay down and tried hard to calm herself:

—Who could tell? Perhaps it was easier to do nothing, and let things take their course. Perhaps it was better to endure without complaining for the rest of her life … lying in bed like this … suffering in silence.

She didn’t love Shmulik. She loved no one. Sometimes she felt drawn to Nosn Heler, but she didn’t trust that feeling. And mothers loved their children, after all. Who could say? Perhaps she’d grow to love this child … She would be a mother.

For several days she suffered in silence without leaving the house, imagining how she would be a mother.

Some joker would certainly make fun of her as he had of Miriam Lyubashits:—What had become of her!—he’d say—She’d become nothing more than a wet nurse! But she’d take no notice and pretend not to hear. Bowed beneath her yoke she’d simply spend every minute following the child’s every footstep and fearing only one thing:

—That, God forbid, the little one didn’t fall.

Soon, though, a beautiful frosty Sunday dawned, and in its brilliant sunshine the intense whiteness of the snow dazzled the eyes for the first time that season, and all the shops were shut because of the Gentile holiday.

Many sleighs both privately owned and publicly hired sped over the frosty whiteness of the city. And the tale that the revitalized outdoors told the surrounding stillness of the fields was wholly composed of the weakened peal of distant bells and the merry sneezing of horses that a sleigh speeding past had here and there mislaid.

Mirel stood alone at the window. Her heart was void of resolution and her sorrow intense. Standing next to a coachman whose sleigh had just been vacated, she noticed, was a young couple keenly interested in both the sleigh and in its wet horse on which the new-fallen snow was slowly freezing. All three, the coachman and the young couple, laughed at the meager amount of small change that was all they could offer for a sleigh ride, and all three were delighted: the coachman from the little windfall that had come his way that day, and the couple from the first snowfall of the season and the fact that they were in love.

Slowly Mirel began dressing to leave the house on some outing. From the closet she unhurriedly drew out her karakul jacket,
*
paused, lost herself in thought, pulled on the jacket, and again fell into a reverie. She’d even gone to the door, but stopped there to examine her own narrow hand and the long fingers with which she’d grasped the handle. Recently her hands had grown very weak, and greenish-blue veins were now clearly visible under the deathly pale skin. For a while she stood there looking at her hand. Then quite suddenly she reconsidered, returned to her bedroom, undressed, and threw herself back into bed. Now everything was so disgusting and oppressive; now it was no longer possible to endure the weakness and submissiveness of the last few days:

—What did they want of her? … Why did they want to make a mother of her? … She couldn’t be a mother … She didn’t want to bear a child …

That same day she spent some time with Ida from whom she learned that there were two obstetricians in town prepared to do “it.”

—One was an old Christian: first he moralized for two hours, then he demanded nothing less than two hundred rubles for “it.” The second was much younger and a Jew. He took no more than a hundred rubles, and word had it that he did the job equally well.

She went to consult the younger doctor, the Jew. Answering all his questions, she was conscious that he was insulting her through the way he looked at her, through his lewd thoughts, and through the tone in which he gave her to understand that although he undertook to do “it,” he regarded her as a sinner and morally far below himself, and therefore he repeated remarks he’d already made:

—Perhaps she was still single and consequently didn’t want any members of her family to find out about this? It was all the same to him. He merely wanted to explain that by doing the work here in his surgery he put himself at far greater risk of discovery, and therefore he required double the fee.

He added:

—In any case, we can wait for two weeks and try a few other methods that can do no harm.

She was cruelly cut by his use of the word “we.” Abruptly interrupting him, she made him feel like a charlatan:

—Good, he’d be paid double.

Afterward she lay calmly by herself in the dining room counting the days that remained of these two weeks:

—When was the appointed day? … Yes, the Monday after the next Sabbath …

And now there was no one to confide in about herself, about the approaching danger that held no terror for her, and about that fact that her hopes for her future life were uncertain and slight. Yet her heart was still drawn to something, and various plans still drifted into her mind. She still thought about herself and about Nosn Heler’s penny newspaper which had recently started appearing and had even found its way into Shmulik’s study:

—Now there was even Nosn Heler … Even he had succeeded in accomplishing something.

Under the weight of his sufferings, Shmulik sat in his study with that very newspaper. Glancing into it like a mourner, he kept silent for hours at a time, thought constantly of Mirel, but dared not go in to speak with her. He looked like a man who was fasting intermittently. Most of the time he stayed in the distillery; when he returned home, he spent the night in his study, and rarely left it. When the younger Lyubashits, that incessantly chattering student, called on him on one occasion, he couldn’t endure that fact that he, Lyubashits, was prattling on so heartily and loudly while Mirel was lying on the sofa in the adjoining room, and he stopped him after his first few words:

—Hush! … Quieter, please … What’s making you so cheerful?

And the Monday came.

Around eleven o’clock in the morning, Shmulik arrived back from town on the streetcar and saw in the distance:

Wearing her karakul jacket, Mirel stood at the streetcar stop opposite one of the Gentile city messengers with whom she was sending a letter to someone, and the messenger nodded his head in its red cap as he listened to the identifying characteristics of the person into whose hands he was being instructed to deliver it.

For some reason, Shmulik returned to town. When he finally returned home at around three in the afternoon, Mirel still wasn’t back. For a while he drifted about alone over there, then went out into the courtyard and ordered the britzka harnessed. When someone reported to his father in the big house that Shmulik was driving out to the distillery yet again, his mother felt decidedly uneasy. Going across to his wing to investigate, she found him ready and wearing the fur coat he used for traveling.

—Shmulik—she asked him—you got back from the distillery only yesterday?

Shmulik looked down.

—Tomorrow evening—he said—is Christmas Eve; the workmen all have to be paid before then.

And turning to face the window, he began waiting in silence for his harnessed britzka to leave the courtyard as quickly as possible.

The same day, when lamps were being kindled at nightfall in the dark houses of the suburb, a hired sleigh drawn by two horses drew up before the front door of Shmulik’s wing and a Gentile city messenger, having helped Mirel descend, took her arm and assisted her into the house. Mirel was deathly pale and barely able to walk. With the help of the messenger in his red cap she dragged herself to her bedroom and had hardly strength enough to fall into her bed. The terrified servant girl, the only person left in charge of the house, wanted to raise the alarm and hurry off to seek help from the mother-in-law in the big house, but summoning what strength she had, Mirel stopped her and called her over to the bed:

—It wasn’t necessary … It wasn’t necessary … The girl was to take her purse and pay the messenger and not dare to speak a word of any of this to anyone.

Dozing in weakness and pain, her features somewhat contorted, she lay in bed with her eyes shut and passed a restless night, her thoughts jumbling together the numerous morbid events of the day through which she’d just passed. She remembered the hours of waiting in the doctor’s reception room, the young woman in mourning who’d sat there silently, the agitated, small-town young wife who was continually scurrying about the room in terror, the foolish, embarrassed giggling of the unmarried young woman with the intelligent face who’d been escorted by an elderly Jewish midwife. All this seemed to merge with the frosty sunshine that peered in through the double-glazed windows, and all of it ceased to exist the very moment the door of the surgery closed behind her. Afterward something happened to Mirel outside. She was feeling as though her legs might give way beneath her and she might collapse at any moment, and her head was spinning when she recognized the Gentile city messenger in the distance. But now everything was over. Outside, night had fallen, and she lay in her own bed, suffering a little pain but remembering only one thing:

—The danger of pregnancy had passed, but now a new danger lay before her. It was possible … highly possible that she would never get down off this bed …

Three days later, when Shmulik returned from the distillery in the morning, her face was aflame with fever for the second day in succession. Although her lips were dry, not a single bottle of medication was to be found in the whole room.

Mirel clutched his hand and begged that everything be kept secret:

—I had to do it, Shmulik. We’d both have been unhappy for ever otherwise.

Standing at her bedside with downcast head and an expression of utter desolation, he nevertheless nodded:

—Good … No one will know of this.

Of late, Shmulik had changed completely. That afternoon, when his mother called him aside in a private room and started saying something about Mirel, he was greatly offended and even responded in some anger:

—What did everyone want of Mirel? Everyone had some or other complaint against Mirel.

Subsequently he spent hours pacing over his house, thinking over the new plan he intended to propose to Mirel and about the possibility of traveling somewhere with her for a few days and starting a rumor that he’d divorced her.

—Come what may, he’d never marry again. He had no use for his life and for the huge sums of money he was earning—at least he’d know one thing: Mirel was settled somewhere and he was able to send her the means on which to live … He was also prepared to send her the bill of divorcement at a moment’s notice, whenever she might need it.

Meanwhile at the elder Zaydenovski’s house a great many telegramaddressed to Mirel kept arriving from somewhere. Each time Shmulik was summoned to the big house and secret conferences about these cables were held with him. Shmulik was scared, read every newly arrived telegram with a pounding heart, and finally rushed off in great haste on the express train. He returned a few days later with an ashen face and very red eyes. He’d apparently spent hours weeping somewhere. Mirel, her face haggard but no longer feverish, was sitting up in bed by then. Lost in thought, she stared through the window and asked him nothing. And fearful of something, he stood opposite her in a state of utter dejection with a carefully prepared lie ready to hand:

—I’ve been visiting Aunt Pearl, that’s where I’ve been. Sadly, she’s just lost a son.

That evening the tall young doctor with the light brown hair called at the house. He was anxious to keep a very low profile, this doctor, which was why he called at night, looked carefully around him like a thief as he went in at the front door, and stayed in Mirel’s room no longer than few minutes.

—Everything is as it should be—he said.—Mirel could get up the next day.

He made haste to leave and was soon gone. Taking a lamp from his study, Shmulik saw him out as though he were a wonder-working rabbi, but the doctor, appraising him with a shrewd glance, bade him put the lamp down:

—She’s got a proper blockhead for a husband—he thought, in regard to Mirel.—Evidently he’s got very few brains.

Shmulik, however, was in a state of confusion and held ready a full twenty-five rubles so, snatching the banknotes with one hand the doctor placed his other hand on Shmulik’s shoulder:

—You’ve a fine young wife—he flattered Shmulik hastily.—She’s very strong … May the same be said of all Jews.

Only one small matter remained:

Shmulik had to be approached in his study, interrupted for a moment in going through his accounts, and abruptly told what had to be done:

—Shmulik, tomorrow we’re going to the town downriver.

But Mirel herself was still very weak from her ordeal and Shmulik unexpectedly set off for Warsaw before dawn, leaving with the maid a letter for her in which he outlined his new plan. He’d stayed up all night preparing this letter, had rewritten and re-read it many times. Eventually he was satisfied with it, though as a result he’d been unable to fall asleep before he left. But Mirel had glanced through no more than the first few lines before she asked the maid in astonishment.

—What?

Then she replaced the letter in its envelope and returned it to the maid, all of which she did very slowly. On the whole she felt very composed, and after her illness she was more patient than usual. Steadily her strength returned, and she waited calmly for the second week when she’d feel completely well and Shmulik would return from Warsaw.