The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (11 page)

With needlework in hand, she could sit for hours here in the dining room next to the polite and uncommunicative Gitele, and with merciless slowness relate details of her husband’s communal affairs:

—She argued with him, with her Avreml: What’s it to you that the town doesn’t want the assistant rabbi Shloyme’s son as their ritual slaughterer?

She smiled far too much every time Lipkis inquired after Mirele in the hallway, while Gitele examined her fingernails far too closely whenever the rabbi’s wife scratched her ritual wig with a blunt knitting needle and was plainly eager to ask her:

—Long life to you, but are you really not bothered at all that this fellow—to say nothing worse about him—keeps creeping into your house?

In the same silence that filled the unheated salon Mirele lay in her own room, did not so much as glance at Lipkis as he came in and didn’t even change her position to acknowledge him. With sorrow in her blue eyes, she stared for a morosely long time into the corner of the ceiling directly opposite and found herself totally under the influence of the brand-new book that lay open beside her.

—Did he think—she merely asked him—that she’d ever fall in love with anyone again?

This question immediately filled Lipkis with profound regret that he’d come at all, so he went over to the window and angrily took to staring out into the winter landscape. He was even prepared to answer her question by assuring her that she’d never fall in love, and was on the point of beginning, venomously:

—Generally speaking … we really ought to examine the true meaning of this phrase, “fall in love.”

But Mirel was already standing next to the furious young man in a frivolously lighthearted mood, gently pulling his hair:

—You’re such a fool, such a fool—she whispered softly into his ear through childishly clenched teeth.

Soon she started putting on her outdoor winter garments and swearing all manner of oaths:

—If that red-haired dummy—she meant the rabbi’s wife—didn’t clear out of the dining room soon, she’d rip the winter seals off one of the windows and leap outside with him.

Short, damp days followed in quick succession, driving the shtetl ever deeper into winter. Neither indoors nor outdoors offered anything to awaken interest, stirring instead the same indifferent discontent toward everything around, so that one might as well stop every overgrown girl who occasionally strolled down the main street in smartly dressed self-importance, vent one’s frustration on her, and rebuke her in the voice of an older, deeply discontented woman:

—Why are you so choosy, you? … Why don’t you get married? Why?

For vast distances all around, the treasures of wind were imprisoned in the gray mists hanging in the air; they grew heavier and heavier, spreading over the frozen, snow-covered earth that grew dirtier from day to day. The skies were hidden, the horizon erased. The people had no sight of them and the shtetl had no need of them. Like great beasts, houses hunkered down ponderously under their heavy, snow-covered roofs and dozed in an unending reverie.

It seemed:

These houses had ears, hidden, highly attentive ears, continually listening to the great silence that bore down on everything around both from close by and from far away.

It seemed:

They were ready, in response to the slightest, most remote rustle from the fields, to spring up and in great rage and haste rush to confront it, like those starving dogs that race forward to challenge some alien intruder of their own species, an unwelcome guest.

Smoke puffed from the chimney of one of the houses, but instead of rising up into the sky it sank downward, feebly described circles in the air, and finally spread itself over the snow.

In the empty marketplace, several people with nothing to do stood around a sleigh that had brought reeds to sell as fuel. They mocked the stubborn peasant with his exorbitant prices and exasperated him with their sharp-tongued witticisms. And the shopkeepers, muffled up in winter clothing and lounging in boredom at the entranceways of their shops, watched all this from a distance, took pleasure in it, and laughed.

The marketplace was filled with vacancy, and only on the small square in front of the house of Avrom-Moyshe Burnes, the man who would’ve been Mirele’s father-in-law, stood five or six expensive sleighs, fully harnessed and waiting for their owners who had business indoors. These sleighs were attended by their energetic, fur-clad drivers who, having nothing else to do, examined one another’s horses and passed judgment on them:

—Just look at this one—it’ll go blind in its left eye.

—And what about that one? … Even at rest it can’t put weight on its hind leg.

And the horses stood where they were and did what came naturally to them; from time to time they shook themselves, trying to throw off the congealed sweat while numerous small bells tinkled on their necks, telling the outside world everything that was taking place within the house:

—Rich landowners were visiting, arranging loans for themselves in the smoke-filled study.

—Worldly merchants were there, speculators who weren’t afraid to make purchases a year in advance, and the spacious, half-lit entrance hall was packed with estate stewards and couriers prepared at any moment to appear before their departing employers, ready to receive their instructions and drive out in all directions.

Whenever he had occasion to pass this house with Mirele, Lipkis did not feel entirely comfortable.

He tried in every possible way to forget about it, and to this end had even made strenuous efforts to fix his mind on serious thoughts:

—In two years’ time he’d complete his studies in the faculty of medicine …

As though out of spite, however, Mirele insisted on staring at this house every time they passed and refused to leave him in peace:

—Could he explain it? Why on earth had they painted the outer shutters blue? That was so garish to look at.
*

Or:

—All of them: Avrom-Moyshe Burnes, Brokhe and Feyge, her former fiancé’s sisters … they were all such refined people … she’d once loved them very much. Even now she sometimes had a strong desire to see them.

Lipkis was outraged and could no longer restrain himself:

—He had absolutely no idea to whom she was referring in such exalted terms.

—And anyway, creatures were generally divided into only two categories: human beings and animals.

Thus, the next question followed logically:

—If these pigs were human beings, then what was he, Lipkis? …

Mirele turned to him with a strange look:

—
Milostivi gosudar
, most gracious sir, would you be so kind as to keep your philosophical speculations in check until tomorrow?

After this, he did not speak again the whole way, walked beside her in great anger, and tormented himself:

—What was there to say? … If every serious thought he had seemed foolish to her …

She didn’t turn to look at him, even after they’d left the long main street behind and had stopped on the deserted, snow-covered promenade outside the town.

Gazing somewhere along the road that even a short distance ahead disappeared into the mist and led to the farm of her former fiancé, she merely remarked, softly and pensively:

—Listen, Lipkis, if I were as nasty as you, I’d certainly strangle myself with my own hands.

And she stood like that for a long time, unable to tear her mournful eyes from the road.

Was she waiting for that speck, the sleigh that had pulled out of the distant mist and was making its way along the road in this direction, and was she curious to know who was seated in it?

Or perhaps at that moment she was simply dispirited and overcome by the vanity of all things and was unwilling to leave this deserted, snow-covered place?

Yet in town, several women still continued to maintain that her heart still yearned for her former fiancé, that handsome young man who had the patience to pass the long winter months on his productive but now fallow farm, and that there was nothing more to it:

—She’d always been pampered at home, and couldn’t bring herself to marry such an ordinary young man.

Often the two of them, Mirel and Lipkis, wandered for long distances over the snow-covered fields, looked behind them, and noticed:

Far in the distance, the entire shtetl had sunk down into the valley between the two bare mountains, and had left no trace of itself in the misty air.

Lipkis was delighted that he was all alone with her here in the wintry silence of the deserted fields, that the uncommunicative Gitele was nowhere near him, and that Libke, the rabbi’s young wife, wasn’t scratching her wig with the blunt end of a knitting needle thinking about him. For sheer joy, clever philosophical thoughts even came flooding into his mind one after another, and he was ready at any moment to pose such clever questions as, for example:

—He couldn’t begin to understand why human beings had built houses for themselves instead of wandering about in couples over this huge frozen world?

But Mirel looked sad and abstracted, and was quite capable of regarding every one of his thoughts as foolishness, so he thought better of speaking and walked on in silence at her side. They skirted the knoll with its heavily wooded copse and crossed the low, narrow wooden bridge under which, from the time of the first frosts, a silent frozen brook had lain in repose as though passing a long, wintry Sabbath. From there they ascended the easy incline of another hill and finally reached the level railway lines bordered by telegraph poles that stretched out into the distance like a long black stripe and divided the snowy whiteness of the fields in two. At this place every day three long passenger trains crept out of the distant horizon in the east, carried their great noisy clamor swiftly past as they disappeared into the misty remoteness of the west, and left behind in the surrounding silence of the fields the mournful echo of many unhappy tales begun but not concluded:

A tale of a beautiful young wife who’d deceived her husband for a long time and from somewhere near here had finally fled abroad with her lover.

A tale of a devout and observant Jew who passed through here, desecrating the Sabbath with his rabbi’s permission, hastening to the great distant city so he might bend over the body of his dead son and rend his garments in mourning.

Slowly and impotently, in the air close by and farther off, these unfinished little tales floated about, lost themselves in the distant sleeping wood, and faded yearningly away. As they went, the silence all around deepened, and everything began gazing in the direction from which the train had emerged and into which it had disappeared, gazed for a long, long time, until from one of those mist-shrouded routes a new wisp of black smoke appeared and a long new train began rapidly snaking its way down.

Then Mirel snatched off Lipkis’s student cap, set it on the hood that swathed her own head, and positioned herself close to the railway lines to await this long train.

—Among a whole trainload of passengers—she added quietly and dejectedly—there’ll certainly be at least one unhappy person looking very disheartened who won’t move from the window all journey long and will press his brow to the cold windowpane.

And if she did indeed catch sight of someone with that kind of unhappy expression at the window of one of the carriages, she bowed for a long time, waved the cap, and monotonously and mockingly repeated several times:

—We’re also unhappy … also unhappy … also unhappy …

On one occasion, returning from the railway line to the shtetl and emerging on to the snow-covered, deserted promenade, Mirele recognized her former fiancé’s sleigh in the distance, and stopped to wait for him.

Lipkis gave her a very odd look, as though he wanted to murder her, and she blushed deeply and even raised her voice at him:

—Why was he looking at her so strangely?

And this was only because she didn’t want him to notice that her mood of desolation had unpredictably evaporated. She even added, in Russian:

—
Ty glupyi
—You’re a fool.

And before long, with joyful abandon, she began throwing snowballs at him, hurling them and laughing, leaping about and laughing, once again snatching up whole handfuls of snow, throwing them and laughing again, finally forcing him to limp some distance away from her, hunch himself up, and cover his scowling face with both hands.

The conveyance with its new black horses drew nearer, so hiding her hands behind her back, filled as they were with snowballs, and smiling a little, she looked into her former fiancé’s face with wide-open, inquiring eyes.

Clad in a wide, aristocratic sheepskin coat the outside of which was covered in blond fur, he sat deep within his highly polished sleigh, from time to time saying a few words to the driver in a manner appropriate to a landowner.

In truth he failed to look round the whole time either at her or at Lipkis, and for a long while, as though turned to stone, she stood where she was, following his sleigh with her eyes and watching it disappear with him among the first houses of the shtetl.

—He’s grown handsomer—she observed quietly, as though to herself, and was soon lost in thought.

Only when they neared the shtetl did she grow a little more cheerful, acquire a strangely triumphant expression, and add:

—And his beard, Lipkis … he’s shaved off his beard, after all.

Lipkis was furious and said nothing. He felt oddly bitter at heart, and never stopped thinking angrily:

—Who could believe the kind of rubbish this woman forced him to get involved with? … What possible difference could it make to him whether or not this oaf shaved his beard?

Mirel too kept silent all the way back, once again sank into deep melancholy and despondent pensiveness, and stared down at her slow steps with eyes too wide.

Suddenly she stopped and asked, without raising her bowed head:

—Didn’t Lipkis feel the same as she did? … People were all far too old and far too clever to go on living. Perhaps now was the time for them all to die out, and for new ones to be born in their place.