The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (39 page)

Every afternoon she put on her jacket and her black scarf. Since she was still too weak to go into town, she stood outside next to the steps leading up to her front door, unhurriedly pacing to and fro and awakening wishful thoughts in the well-to-do young businessmen passing by in their own or in hired droshkies on the road outside. All turned their heads toward her, unable to tear their eyes away, and at the same time all of them felt very odd, as though none of them had ever sinned before and she had for many years been the unknown bride of their dreams.

In her father-in-law’s house, what she’d done during the past two weeks was already known. Her mother-in-law was often to be found closeted with her husband at all times of the working day, sitting opposite him, her face red with anger and her nostrils tightly pinched, beside herself with vexation and powerlessness:

—I’m telling you: such a despicable person is rarely to be found even among Gentiles.

And Mirel pottered about in her room, thought back to the pregnancy she’d escaped, and continued to have little faith in the new life that lay before her. With nothing else to do, she once more started going into town and disappearing there for whole evenings at a time. At first no one knew where she went and with whom she passed the time, but in due course she met one of her husband’s relatives in the street on which Nosn Heler had his lodgings and in her mother-in-law’s house this was discussed fully and frankly:

—What possible question could there be? That woman was despicable … She’d been in love with that young man before she was married, and now she spent evening after evening in his company.

During this period Shmulik returned from Warsaw, gave orders for his bed to be carried into the study, stopped going across to his father’s house, and generally started living like a recluse. His quiet conduct and crestfallen demeanor bespoke something mute and stubborn and it seemed that even while he was pacing about in his room, he found himself somewhere far, far away across a distance of a hundred miles and more. Meeting him in town on one occasion, Ida Shpolianski asked him about the divorce and he answered her coldly and quietly:

—Who knows? … Quite possibly the whole situation might reverse itself.

Then Ida had summoned Mirel by telephone,
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wandered through the quiet streets with her until nightfall, and reported this:

—Now you’ll see … Now Shmulik won’t grant you the divorce.

Exactly the same thing had happened with her Abram four years before. During all that time he’d been prepared to give her a divorce, but when matters came to a head, he’d left home for an entire month and informed her through his younger brother Ziame:
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—At present Ida doesn’t need the divorce papers, but as soon as she finds she must have them, I’ll provide them within two hours.

That evening, looking distressed and exhausted, Mirel called on Heler, lay on his sofa longer than was her custom, and was more than usually pensive. Clearly she’d been coming here not for Heler’s sake but for the sake of his quiet room where she could calmly reflect on her future life. Here she rarely broke the silence, had her white kerchief spread over the pillow because Heler’s pillowcase was far from clean, lay back, and repeated what she always said:

—She felt comfortable here in this room … She’d never felt as comfortable anywhere else.

The chief reason she felt so comfortable here, it seemed, was that Heler had finally come to his senses and no longer spoke to her about marriage.

She related:

—She wasn’t in the slightest concerned about what Ida had just told her.

She had merely to speak the word and Shmulik would immediately grant her a divorce. There was nothing more.

A month and a half before, she’d known very clearly why she’d needed the divorce; now she lay thinking about every action she’d taken until now:

Everything she’d done up to this point hadn’t come about through acts of her own will but as a result of curiosity and compassion.

She’d derived so little pleasure from her life that she might as well still be eighteen years old. But were she indeed still eighteen, no new step in life would lie before her, and nothing would be left for her but once more to feel compassion for her father and for herself, to marry Shmulik all over again, to divorce him, and to be left lying here thinking:

—Well, good: she’d divorced him. Now what would she do?

Heler thrust his hands into his trouser pockets and began pacing across the room, barely able to contain his pent-up indignation:

—He was nothing to her … She came here not for his sake but for the sake of his sofa and his quiet room in which she could calmly think about herself. He was convinced that no woman had ever behaved in this way toward a man.

He observed her as she donned her outdoor garments, as she made ready to leave, and as he accompanied her out. He respected her silent pensiveness.

Every evening afterward, in this quiet room suffused with the greenish light that seeped from under its lampshades, he continued to await her coming, longing for her as one longed for a wife with whom one had recently entered into a sanctified and long-awaited marriage. The very air here in his room was redolent of her. He was drawn to the place where she’d lain, to her sorrowful, remote expression, to the thought that on her account he’d once given up preparing for his university entrance examinations; that here in the city his former fiancée had by now hastily married some young jurist who was a widower; that his financial investment in his penny newspaper was going steadily downhill and that this was the common talk of the town:

—Only a miracle’s keeping that penny paper going; it’ll collapse very soon.

But all in all Mirel came to see him only once more, and then only for a few minutes. She’d been left oppressed and disconsolate after a highly unpleasant scene that had taken place a little earlier between her and her husband in regard to the divorce, and hadn’t wanted to discuss it. All she did was to pace briefly through the room deep in thought.

She said nothing, did not remove her coat or her overshoes and found difficulty in swallowing, like someone who was fasting. Without looking round at him, she left almost immediately. When he made as though to accompany her, she bade him stay indoors, but he followed her outside nevertheless, pursued her to the next intersection, and said a few words to her that he himself didn’t believe:

—Someone wanted to buy his penny newspaper and had offered him five thousand rubles … They’d be able to travel abroad … This might be sufficient until he could qualify as an engineer over there.

Again she did not look round at him, quickened her pace, and merely shrugged her shoulders. In the end he was left standing where he was, and from a distance saw her seat herself in a streetcar and return to the house she hated.

On a second occasion he met her in the street near the huge, luxurious house in which lived her husband’s relative Montchik. She was walking with a dark-haired young woman who looked some five or six years older than she; apparently this was her cousin Ida Shpolianski. He stopped and doffed his hat. She noticed him but, as previously, looked at the young woman accompanying her, said something to her, and passed by very close to him. Wordlessly, her severe and unbending carriage revealed much about her, this unhappy only child: she truly could find no place for herself in this life, but she clung obstinately to some notion of her own and had compassion neither for herself nor for anyone else.

She turned at the next corner and disappeared with her companion. Still standing where she’d passed him, he sighed, replaced his hat, and strode on his way.

He was obliged to call on Montchik Zaydenovski, to feel uncomfortable in his company as one of her husband’s relatives, and to ask him:

—Perhaps after all he might be able to find someone with money prepared to come into partnership with him on the penny newspaper? …

Montchik’s desk was low, heavy, and wide. On it, apart from various ponderous objects, also stood photographs of his late father and of Mirel, each in its own leather frame, directly facing this young entrepreneur. From time to time, leaning his head on his hand, Montchik gazed at the latter, his eyes huge:

—Something’s going on with Mirel …

Since the last time he’d met her in the street and escorted her over the chain bridge, a city messenger had brought him a letter in which she asked him to lend her two hundred rubles. Then the two hundred rubles had been returned to him together with a formal note in Hebrew from Shmulik:

—My dear kinsman, our teacher and master Montchik! Thanks and thanks again for the generous loan you made to my dear wife Mirele, long may she live.

As his younger eleven-year-old brother came in from the dining room, he greeted him warmly and loudly:

—Ah, Reb Liolia
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… What does a Jew have to say for himself, Reb Liolia?

Like him, Liolia disliked the Gentile youths who called on his sister the singer, and like him could also not endure her shrieking. Montchik loved him because he was a tough, wiry boy with good understanding who often exposed his sister’s lies, and above all because he’d certainly make something of himself. He also loved him because Mirel had seen him once, had said that she liked him, and had caressed his head. Taking Liolia by the hand, he asked him a question, glancing sideways at Mirel’s photograph, his mind still preoccupied with his earlier thought:

—Something’s going on with Mirel …

About three o’clock one afternoon Montchik was sitting lost in thought at this desk, responding wearily to the parting greetings of the last of numerous clients who’d been coming and going in his office from early morning on.

His mind was numb, filled with the chaotic events he’d lived through the day before. There in the suburb, in his uncle Yankev-Yosl’s house, the entire Zaydenovski family had been in total uproar, because for the second day in succession Mirel had been living in the hotel on the quiet street with its long central island of trees. At eleven o’clock at night his mother, Aunt Esther, had been summoned, frenzied information having been given her over the telephone about what was taking place in that overcrowded, panic-stricken house:

—Shmulik had disappeared … He’d not been seen since the evening of the day before … A search had been instituted for him … He’d been looked for everywhere in town. Eh? … In the distillery? Yes, in the distillery as well.

Lying undressed in bed, Montchik had waited for his mother until three in the morning. His head throbbed, and deep within himself he felt the full weight of the panic in the Zaydenovskis’ house. He said nothing, but he had some idea of what was taking place there, and he knew that all his relatives over there suspected him, something that was ridiculous … Now he was quite unable to call there.

His mother returned about four in the morning. In his underwear he opened the door for her himself and then sat on her bed with her for a long time. All the while his distracted mind was racing wildly, but his mother took her time … By now she too apparently knew about the suspicion that had fallen on him as she very slowly imparted the melancholy tidings:

—Well, what more is there to say? … Shmulik’s not there and they’re all afraid that something’s happened to him.

… . When that woman does the kind of thing she does:

Very soon after “that woman’s” departure, Shmulik had posted a notice outside announcing that his house was to let and that he was selling his furniture; people said that he’d also left a letter addressed to his parents. Very likely they were too ashamed to make this letter public …

—Ida Shpolianski’s brother-in-law reported that he’d seen Shmulik skulking near Kromowski’s pharmacy the evening before. Now someone had read in the evening newspaper that a hanged body had been in the coppice around the hospital, and everyone had instantly rushed off to the morgue.

As dawn broke, Montchik dozed off and dreamed that he was living in the same hotel as Mirel, in the room adjacent to hers, and from the window noticed Shmulik wandering up and down on the sidewalk opposite.

Now, after a half-day’s work, he was extremely tired and preoccupied. He remembered the foolishness of thinking, as he awoke that morning, that he had to call on Mirel at her hotel that very day, and that Mirel would be very pleased he’d come. He still had business in the banks and several people to see at the stock exchange, so he hastily locked his scattered papers in the safe and snatched up his overcoat. Outside his front door, however, he suddenly froze and turned deathly pale, as though he’d seen a wandering corpse: on the sidewalk opposite stood Shmulik, his dull features the color of clay. He was unwilling to say where he’d spent the past two nights, and had now come to Montchik to ask a favor:

—Two days before—he related—Mirel had left the house and had refused to take any money from him … He’d begged her but she’d refused and gone away … And now … Perhaps Montchik might be willing to call on her in her hotel and entreat her to take some money? …

Some weeks later, a tall young man in a black autumn cloak and a very broad-brimmed, foreign-looking hat left a house that rented furnished rooms on the central avenue and strolled slowly down to the chain bridge leading into the suburb. This was Herz, the midwife’s acquaintance Herz.

For six consecutive weeks in the godforsaken shtetl in which he lived, he’d smiled at the letter in which Mirel pleaded with him to come, and now he’d finally done as she asked, seemingly in jest and on the spur of the moment. Around noon, when he awoke in his furnished room here in town, he suddenly reminded himself that he was still a bachelor; that he was now thirty-two years old, and that at times very few of the pieces he’d written pleased him; that here in this city Mirel, whom he’d thought of all the time he’d spent traveling down, had a husband, a home, and an entire family of relatives. And he’d been given his just deserts, after all … He fully deserved the self-mocking laughter that often broke from him as he was dressing.

Smiling good-humoredly, he’d wandered about the streets for a few days.