The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (43 page)

—What nonsense were they speaking? To judge by the picture they themselves painted of Mirel, it seemed to him that she was an interesting person, and there had to be something to her.

Now he was captivated by her young, slightly weary face, and was by no means indifferent to her smile, to the fact that, seated on the red plush sofa, she held her head high and thrown a little back, or to her voice, modulated by the enervated tones of one who’d lived through a great deal yet remained stubbornly loyal to some private ideal and paid no mind to the opinions of others. Hence he held his peace throughout and thought of her as a bridegroom might think of his bride. He kept forgetting that the external student, the family’s young relative, didn’t smoke, and kept approaching him with an outstretched hand and the mien of a beggar:

—Would you please be so kind as to give me a cigarette?

The elder of Velvl’s sisters was the first to hear the buggy driving away from the house and, forgetting where she was, craned her neck like a hen terrified that someone was menacingly following her on tiptoe, and foolishly strained to listen more closely. And for some reason Mirel, who was now aware that there was no longer anyone in the study, asked the external student for a pencil and a sheet of paper.

She seemed to do nothing with this writing equipment, holding the pencil in one hand and the sheet of paper in the other as she smilingly prepared to leave. Yet later, in the pocket of his dustcoat, Velvl found this sheet of paper. On it, in Mirel’s handwriting, were two words in Russian:

—
Ty khoroshi
—You’re a good person.

He read it again and again all the way home, carried it about among the banknotes in his wallet for several days, and finally hid it in a separate little drawer in his safe.

Mirel finally succeeded in carrying out her plan here in the shtetl.

Quite unexpectedly one morning she received the reply for which she’d been waiting all this time and was greatly pleased with it. On her way back from the post office with this response, she stopped the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan in the middle of the street, told him that his new horn-rimmed spectacles suited his face very well, and firmly declared that he ought to get married:

—She hoped Safyan would believe that she meant every word: he had a profession, so why would he want to drift through life all alone?

A nervous tic spontaneously afflicted the left side of Safyan’s face. He entertained quite definite opinions about getting married and genuinely wished to start airing them, but she interrupted him almost immediately to ask when the nineteenth of the month would be:

—It was essential for her to know this … when exactly the nineteenth of this month would fall.

The nineteenth day of the secular month happened to correspond exactly to the first day of the Hebrew month of Av, a day on which the heat of the bright sunlight hours of summer seemed to intensify.

The melancholy of the approaching Nine Days lay heavy on the shtetl.
*
In order to escape its oppression, men took an afternoon nap, cocks crowed either by mistake or out of a sense of desolation, and women couldn’t understand the feeling of wretchedness that prevented them from knitting their socks in peace, and drove them instead from the cover of their own porches to those of their neighbors.

Around three o’clock that very afternoon, a cab driver from the railway station stopped his buggy in front of the inn at the entrance to the marketplace, and down climbed a tall, clean-shaven young man whose throat was swaddled in cotton wool and a great many bandages.

On closer scrutiny he was recognized:

—This was Herz, the midwife’s acquaintance Herz.

Mirel had finally succeeded in getting him to come down here.

From all the surrounding dwellings, people stared at her as she sat beside Libke, the rabbi’s wife, whiling away the tedium on the verandah of the rabbi’s house, and ridiculed her:

—She certainly knew the right time to bring him down … She made him come just in time for Tisha B’Av.

From somewhere she soon learned that Herz was suffering from tonsillitis, so she stopped the local feldsher in the side street next to the rabbi’s house and told him of this illness:

—He was regrettably the kind of person who’d sooner die than admit he was suffering any kind of pain. But if the feldsher were to call on him now, unbidden, he’d certainly let him treat his throat.

The
feldsher
did as he was asked and went off to the inn.

She herself returned to the verandah of the rabbi’s house and sat down beside Libke the rabbi’s wife to resume whiling away the tedium. She looked sad, and complained to Libke that the day was passing with extraordinary slowness:

—When the shadow of this house reaches the middle of the street, it’s invariably six o’clock, but now … now this seems to be a particularly long day. There doesn’t seem to have been another day as long as this all summer.

Later, when the shadow of this house had started merging with the shadows of all the surrounding houses, she left the verandah and went off along the road that led to the post office. There she met Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s two daughters who were out for a stroll with their tutor, the student. Looking sad, she paused opposite them to inquire about the shortcut across the fields to the railway line, and about a certain well-to-do young woman, an orphan from the local district, who’d been engaged for many years but hadn’t yet married her fiancé:

—Didn’t they remember? Many tales had been told about this young woman once.

Looking at her, both Burnes sisters called to mind their older brother who’d remained unmarried because of her, and knew also that because of her, Herz had now come down here. So they answered: “No, they couldn’t remember.”

—They’d never heard of such a person, they were sure.

The student, however, was greatly excited by this unexpected meeting, and was fully prepared to walk up and down the road with Mirel in the big-city manner. For this reason he tried to continue the conversation:

—Be that as it may … The story about this young woman must be very interesting, whatever the case.

Mirel, however, pretended not to hear and soon took her leave. Walking on beyond the outskirts of the shtetl, she wandered about there alone through the long twilight.

That evening, when people were sitting down to their meal in all the shtetl’s houses and it was difficult to recognize anyone on the dark and deserted streets, she slipped into the inn at the entrance to the marketplace and spent a considerable time with Herz in his room.

The red curtains that hung over Herz’s illuminated windows had been drawn, and no one was wandering about in the street outside except the young woman studying dentistry, the niece of the widow who ran the inn. Intensely curious to know what Herz and Mirel were speaking about in there, she quietly slipped into the empty room adjacent doors with their knotholes, and heard them reopening old wounds:

—Herz—Mirel started to say—I’ve waited such along time for you here; I’m sure no one’s ever waited for you as long as this.

There was silence in the room. Herz was angry and made no reply.

—Herz—Mirel went on—recently I’ve understood so little of what’s been happening with me; I don’t know why I’ve thought about you so much; I don’t even know for what reason I came back here, to this shtetl.

She paused in thought for a moment and then added:

—She’d thought that things would be better for her here in the shtetl. She still thought that
somewhere
things would be better for her.

Herz tinkled a teaspoon in a glass as he prepared a solution of boric acid
*
for his throat with boiling water from the samovar.

—All well and good—he interrupted her—but why on earth had she so stubbornly insisted that he come down to meet her here, in this shtetl of all places, where everyone knew her and where prying eyes stared out at him from every house? Even the midwife Schatz lived in the vicinity … Now he felt like some kind of brainless provincial bridegroom, all thanks to such colossal idiocy as her self-indulgent whim.

Mirel made him no reply: her voice simply started sounding more worn out, as though she’d come to beg alms from him:

—Herz, it still seems to me that you know much more than I do.

Generally speaking she still imagined that somewhere there were still a few such individuals who knew something but they kept their knowledge secret … She begged Herz’s pardon for having summoned him down here … So little was left to her in life outside her imaginings. And now she was living in this shtetl again … she whiled away the tedium thinking of these things. For whole evenings on end she sat on the verandah next to Libke the rabbi’s wife looking west, toward the red sky aflame with the setting sun. During one such evening she’d imagined that, from this ruddy extremity of the sky, an alternative fiery Mirel was staring back at her, beckoning to her from a distance: “No one,” that beckoning gesture seemed to say, “knew why Mirel Hurvits blundered aimlessly around the world, and I, the Mirel burning on the horizon in this fiery extremity of the sky, I too once blundered about and I too had no idea why.”

As Herz had no idea what she wanted, a barely perceptible smile flitted across his ironic expression and stayed there all the time she was speaking. He was frustrated by this discussion and finally interrupted her:

—Quite possibly, but what was the use of spending their first evening talking about such high-flown things?

He could tell her that on one occasion her husband’s cousin Montchik had called on him at his hotel … He’d come wearing a black frock coat. Yes, and her husband himself as well:

—They’d informed him in the hotel that her husband had inquired for him on two separate occasions.

Then Mirel stared across at him, and spoke not a single word more. His last remark had deeply insulted her. She turned pale and did not so much as bid him good night. For a moment she stopped and stood indecisively in the darkened corridor of the inn, but made no attempt to turn back. She merely adjusted her scarf and disappeared into the darkness outdoors.

When the young woman who was studying dentistry left the inn, Herz was standing at the open door of his brightly lit room asking for pen and ink and another kerosene lamp. Outside, the young woman walked past the inn, peering down the street. The night was dark and cool, the shtetl was asleep, and Mirel was nowhere to be seen. To determine in which direction she’d gone was impossible: left, to the rabbi’s house, or right, taking the road that led to the post office and the fields on the outskirts of the shtetl.

In the early hours of the morning, Libke the rabbi’s wife raised her head from her pillow in the darkness, leaned over to the second bed in which her husband was sleeping, and began calling to him in a muffled, sleepy voice:

—Avreml?! … Avreml?! … Are you sleeping, Avreml?

The whole house was dark, silent, and forlorn. The night had utterly enveloped it, had everywhere coiled itself around the extinguished shtetl and far beyond, encircling the surrounding fields where the desolation of all those asleep beat quietly on the ground.

The rabbi jerked slightly and started awake with sleepy alarm and a half-strangulated question:

—Eh?!

Later they both lay half-awake in their beds, raised their heads in the darkness, and heard Mirel weeping behind the locked door on the other side of the wall. The sounds she made were gagging, stifled, and full of yearning. Every now and then they were intensified by a fresh rush of full-throated sobs that recalled her childhood years as an indulged only child. Under the wracked shuddering of her body the bed could be heard creaking, as though someone standing over her had seized her by the throat and was choking her while uttering the repeated reminder:

—You’ve destroyed your life … And it’s lost now, lost forever …

Befuddled with sleep, the rabbi’s wife sat up in her bed and adjusted her nightcap.

—She’s been to see him—she remarked, referring to Herz at the inn.—She’s spent the whole evening with him.

Then she quietly opened a shutter and saw:

The gray light of dawn was already creeping over the shtetl. In all the neighboring houses, people were still asleep, and only farther off, where the marketplace began, were lights still burning in Herz’s room in the inn where the red curtains were still drawn, concealing him and the writing at which he’d gone on working through the night.

Two nights before Tisha B’Av, rain fell steadily and for a long time. It beat down on sleeping roofs but was unable to wake them, and drenched a solitary peasant wagon dragging its way slowly over the muddy shtetl, directing it toward the single, restless, illuminated window ahead that stared out of the rabbi’s sodden side street.

Something disturbing had befallen Mirel again, with the result that the rabbi’s wife slept badly in her bedroom, conscious of the incredulity aroused in the shtetl that she and her husband permitted Mirel to live in a rabbi’s house while at the same time keeping an unmarried man at the inn here. The rabbi’s wife had no idea what she’d done to deserve all these troubles, and kept opening her eyes and sighing to her husband loudly enough for Mirel to hear in her own room:

—Oh, how trying this all is! … But how does one tell someone: Pack up your things and get out?

The next morning was hot, humid, and tedious. Among the drying clods of earth, puddles of rainwater and a few shards of glass glared too brightly in the sunlight, and the newly rinsed houses dried rapidly for the sake of Tisha B’Av, uncertain of whether the rain would sweep down to soak them again.

Behind the locked door of Mirel’s room the agitated pacing of the night before could still be heard.

Around eleven o’clock in the morning she left that room in haste and went straight to the inn where the hired buggy was already waiting for Herz. The blue shadows under her eyes were as dark as bruises, and the angle of her back spoke clearly of the fact that her situation both here in the shtetl and everywhere else was now irremediable and irrecoverable and had to be terminated as quickly as possible. She looked straight ahead at the buggy next to the inn, her mind working too rapidly and with too much tension because of her sleepless night.