Collected Stories (85 page)

The door opened and Rivkele entered. “Your mother isn’t here?” she asked me.

“She went to pay a sick call on somebody.”

“I borrowed a glass of salt from her yesterday and I’m giving it back.” She put a glass of salt on the table, then looked at me with a bashful smile.

“I didn’t get the chance to wish you good luck at the engagement party, so I’m doing it now,” I said.

“Thank you kindly. God willing, the same to you.” After a pause, she added, “When it’s your turn.”

We talked, and I told her that I was going back to Warsaw. This was supposed to remain a secret, but I boasted to her that I was a writer and had just been made a staff member on a periodical. I showed her the magazine, and she gazed at me in astonishment. “You must have some brain!”

“To write, what you need most is an eye.”

“What do you write—your thoughts?”

“I tell stories. They call it literature.”

“Oh yes, things happen in the big cities,” Rivkele said, nodding. “Here time stands still. There used to be a fellow here who read novels, but the Hasidim broke in on him and tore them all to shreds. He ran away to Brody.”

She sat down on the edge of the bench and glanced toward the door, ready to spring up the moment anyone might come in. She said, “In other towns they put on plays, hold meetings, and whatnot, but here everyone is old-fashioned. They eat and they sleep, and that’s how the years go by.”

I realized that I was doing wrong to say this, but I said it anyway: “Why didn’t you arrange to marry someone from a city?”

Rivkele thought it over. “Do they care around here what a girl wants? They marry you off and that’s that.”

“So it wasn’t a love match?”

“Love? In Old-Stikov? They don’t know the meaning of the word.”

I am not an agitator by nature, and I had no reason to praise the Enlightenment that had disenchanted me, but somehow, as if against my will, I began to tell Rivkele that we lived in the twentieth century, not in the Middle Ages; that the world had awakened and that villages like Old-Stikov weren’t merely physical quagmires but spiritual ones as well. I told her about Warsaw, Zionism, socialism, Yiddish literature, and the Writers’ Club, where my brother was a member and to which I held a guest pass. I showed her pictures in the magazine of Einstein, Chagall, the dancer Nijinsky, and of my brother.

Rivkele clapped her hands. “Oy, he resembles you like two drops of water!”

I told Rivkele that she was the prettiest girl I had ever met. What would become of her here in Old-Stikov? She would soon begin bearing children. She would go around like the rest of the women in coarse boots and a dirty kerchief over a shaved head and take old age upon herself. The men here all visited the Belzer rabbi’s court and he was said to perform miracles, but I heard that every few months epidemics raged in town. The people lived in filth, knew nothing about hygiene, science, or art. This was no town—I spoke dramatically—but a graveyard.

Rivkele’s blue eyes with the long eyelashes gazed at me with the indulgence of a relative. “Everything you say is the pure truth.”

“Escape from this mudhole!” I cried out like a seducer in a trashy novel. “You are young and a beauty, and I can see that you’re clever, too. You don’t have to let your years waste away in such a forsaken place. In Warsaw you could get a job. You could go out with whoever you please and in the evenings take courses in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish—whatever you wish. I’ll be there, too, and if you want we’ll meet. I’ll take you to the Writers’ Club, and when the writers get a glimpse of you they’ll go crazy. You might even become an actress. The actresses who play the romantic parts in the Yiddish theater are old and ugly. Directors are desperate to find young, pretty girls. I’ll get a room and we’ll read books together. We’ll go to the movies, to the opera, to the library. When I become famous, we’ll travel to Paris, London, Berlin, New York. There they’re building houses sixty stories high; trains race above the streets and under the ground; film stars earn a thousand dollars a week. We can go to California, where it’s always summer. Oranges are as cheap as potatoes …”

I had the odd feeling that this wasn’t I talking but the dybbuk of some old enlightened propagandist speaking through my mouth.

Rivkele threw frightened glances toward the door. “The way you talk! Suppose someone hears—”

“Let them hear. I’m not afraid of anybody.”

“My father—”

“If your father loved you he should have found you a better husband than Yantche. The fathers here are selling their daughters like the wild Asiatics. They’re all steeped in fanaticism, superstition, darkness.”

Rivkele stood up. “Where would I spend the first night? Such a fuss would break out that my mother couldn’t endure it. The outcry would be worse than if I converted.” The words stuck in Rivkele’s mouth; her throat moved as if she were choking on something she couldn’t swallow. “It’s easy for a man to talk,” she mumbled. “A girl is like a—the slightest thing and she is ruined.”

“That’s the way it used to be, but a new woman is emerging. Even here in Poland women already have the right to vote. Girls in Warsaw study medicine, languages, philosophy. A woman lawyer comes to the Writers’ Club. She has written a book.”

“A woman lawyer—how is this possible? Someone’s coming.” Rivkele opened the door. My mother was standing at the threshold. It wasn’t snowing, but her dark kerchief had turned hoary with frost.

“Rebbitsin, I brought over the glass of salt.”

“What was the hurry? Well, thank you.”

“If you borrow, you have to pay back.”

“What’s a glass of salt?”

Rivkele left. Mother looked at me suspiciously. “Did you talk to her?”

“Talk? No.”

“As long as you’re here, you must behave decently.”

II

Two years passed. The magazine of which my brother was editor and I the proofreader had failed, but in the meantime I managed to publish a dozen stories and no longer needed a guest pass to the Writers’ Club, because I had become a member. I supported myself by translating books from German, Polish, and Hebrew into Yiddish. I had presented myself before a military board, which had deferred me for a year, but now I had to go before another. Although I often criticized Hasidic conscripts for maiming themselves in order to avoid being accepted for service, I fasted to lose weight. I had heard horrible stories about the barracks: young soldiers were ordered to fall in muck, to leap over ditches; they were wakened in the middle of the night and forced to march for miles; corporals and sergeants beat the soldiers and played malicious tricks on them. It would be better to sit in jail than to fall into the hands of such hooligans. I was ready to go into hiding—even to kill myself. Pilsudski had ordered the military doctors to take only strong young men into the army, and I did everything I could to make myself weak. Besides fasting, I went without sleep; I smoked steadily, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the last; I drank vinegar and herring brine. A publisher had commissioned me to do a translation of Stefan Zweig’s biography of Romain Rolland, and I spent half my nights working on it. I rented a room from an old physician, a onetime friend of Dr. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. The street was named after him.

That night I had worked until three o’clock. Then I lay down on the bed in my clothes. Every time I fell asleep I woke up with a start. My dreams had become strangely vivid. Voices spoke to me from all sides, bells rang, choirs sang. When I opened my eyes I could still hear their reverberations. My heart palpitated, my hair pricked my skull like wires. My hypochondria had returned. My lungs felt compressed and about to collapse. The day was rainy. Whenever I looked out the window I saw a Catholic funeral cortege on its way to Powązek Cemetery. When I finally sat down to work on the translation, Yadzia, the maid, knocked on my door and announced that a young woman was asking for me.

My caller turned out to be Rivkele. I didn’t recognize her immediately. She was smartly dressed in a coat with a fur collar, and a modish hat. She carried a purse and an umbrella. Her hair was cut
à la garçon,
and her dress was stylishly short; it came just to her knees. I felt so addled I forgot to be surprised. Rivkele told me what had happened to her. An American had come on a visit to Old-Stikov. He was a former tailor who said he had become a ladies’-clothing manufacturer in New York. He was a distant relative of her father’s. He assured the family that he had divorced his wife in America and began to court Rivkele. She broke her engagement to Yantche. The visitor from America bought her a diamond ring, went with her to Lemberg, took her to the Yiddish theater, to the Polish theater, to restaurants, and generally behaved like a prospective bridegroom. Together they visited Crakow and Zakopane. Her parents demanded that he marry her, but he came up with all kinds of excuses. He had divorced his wife according to Jewish law, he said, but he still needed a civil decree. On the road, Rivkele began to live with him. Rivkele talked and cried. He had seduced and deceived her. He owned no factory; he worked for someone else. He had not divorced his wife. He was the father of five children. All this came out when his wife suddenly arrived in Old-Stikov and made a scandal. She had family in Jaroslaw and Przemyśl—butchers, draymen, tough fellows. They warned Morris—that was his name—that they would break his neck. They turned him in to the police. They threatened to report him to the American consul. The result was that he went back to his wife and they sailed together to America.

Rivkele’s face was drenched with tears. She trembled, convulsed by hiccuplike sobs. Soon the truth came out. He had made her pregnant; she was in her fifth month. Rivkele moaned. “Nothing is left me but to hang myself!”

“Do your parents know that—”

“No, they don’t know. They’d die of shame.”

This was another Rivkele. She bent down to take a draw on my cigarette. She had to go to the bathroom, and I took her through the living room. The doctor’s wife—a small, thin woman with a pointed face, many warts, and popping eyes that were yellow as if from jaundice—glared at her. Rivkele lingered in the bathroom for such a long time that I feared she had taken poison.

“Who is that creature?” the doctor’s wife demanded. “I don’t like the looks of her. This is a respectable house.”

“Madam, you have no reason to be suspicious.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday. Be so good as to find lodgings somewhere else.”

After a while Rivkele came back to my room. She had washed her face and powdered it. She had put on lipstick.

“You are responsible for my misfortune,” she said.

“
I
am?”

“If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have let myself go with him. Your words stuck in my mind. You spoke in such a way that I wanted to leave home right then and there. When he came, I was—as they say—already ripe.”

I had the urge to scold her and tell her to be on her way, but she started to cry again. Then she began to sing a tune as old as the female sex: “Where do I go now and what do I do? He has slaughtered me without a knife …”

“Did he leave you some money at least?” I asked.

“There is a little left.”

“Maybe something can still be done.”

“Too late.”

We sat without speaking, and the lessons of the moral primers came back to me. No word goes astray. Evil words lead to iniquitous deeds. Utterings of slander, mockery, and profanity turn into demons, hobgoblins, imps. They stand as accusers before God, and when the transgressor dies they run after his hearse and accompany him to the grave.

As if Rivkele guessed my thoughts, she said, “You made me see America like a picture. I dreamed of it at night. You made me hate my home—Yantche, too. You promised to write me, but I didn’t get a single letter from you. When Morris arrived from America, I clutched at him as if I were drowning.”

“Rivkele, I have to report for conscription. I’m liable to be sent to the barracks tomorrow.”

“Let’s go away somewhere together.”

“Where? America has closed its gates. All the roads are sealed.”

III

Nine years went by. It was my third year in New York. From time to time, I published a sketch in a Yiddish newspaper. I lived in a furnished room not far from Union Square. My room was dark. I had to climb four stories to get to it, and it stank of disinfectant. The linoleum on the floor was torn, and cockroaches crawled from beneath it. When I turned on the naked bulb that hung from the ceiling, I saw a crooked bridge table, an overstuffed chair with torn upholstery, and a sink with a faucet that dripped rusty water. The window faced a wall. When I felt like writing—which was seldom—I went to the Public Library at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue. Here in my room, I only lay on the sagging bed and fantasized about fame, riches, and women who threw themselves at me. I had had an affair, but it ended, and I had been alone for months. I kept my ears cocked to hear if I was being summoned to the pay phone below. The walls of the house were so thin that I could hear every rustle—not only on my floor but on the lower floors as well. A group of boys and girls who called themselves a “stock company” had moved in. They were getting ready to put on a play somewhere. In the meantime, they ran up and down the stairs, shrieking and laughing. The woman who changed my bedding told me that they practiced free love and smoked marijuana. Across from me lived a girl who had come to New York from the Middle West to become an actress, and for whole days and half the nights she sang wailing melodies that someone told me were called the “blues.” One evening, I heard her sing over and over again in a mournful chant: