The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (17 page)

Sitting with Nechama Tarabay at a nearby table laden with newly laid-out refreshments was the obese woman who was to have been her mother-in-law, breathing heavily like a fat goose on the run and complaining, between gasps and groans, about her asthma:

—It makes life a torment … an absolute torment …

A little farther to Mirel’s right, cheerful little Tarabay popped up in front of the chair in which her former fiancé’s big-boned father was seated and tried to bring a smile to the studiedly grave face of this unlettered parvenu who’d only recently acquired a veneer of refinement:

—What need is there for so much concern, Reb Avrom-Moyshe? Surely the children are all provided with marriage portions by now, thank God? … So one marries them off and waits for the grandchildren, eh?

Then Tarabay rushed away for a while to see out an important guest, and with a cigarette in his mouth, Avrom-Moyshe Burnes, this darkhaired, studiedly genteel ignoramus, made his way over to Tarabay’s elder son, the student at the polytechnic, and began repeating to him a newly minted bon mot of his own:

—He’d only just this moment posed a riddle … He’d posed this riddle to his father only a moment ago.

Of average height, with simian forehead and nostrils pinched in arrogant disdain, this student had been silently sneering at everything for some time now; all in all, he intensely disliked both his own parents and their assembled guests. And now this studiedly genteel ignoramus Burnes was pestering him with his silly riddle:

—What exactly is the difference between the Count of Kashperivke and Vasil, his lackey?

Mirel took several steps toward the open, brightly lit dining room and, in low spirits, with her cheek pressed against the door, she stopped and saw:

Yet again the unusually long table was being laid, and plates were clattered together so often and so cheerfully that a few of those assembled had their appetites whetted anew. Some of the young people were drifting about there, while others gathered in small groups, and the newly arrived midwife Schatz, her face freshly colored by the cold outside, stood opposite the visiting polytechnic student smoking one of his cigarettes and smiling:

—She knew them … She knew them intimately, these dissolute polytechnic students who liked nothing better than chasing after girls.

Slowly and in an oddly despondent frame of mind, Mirel went up to the midwife, embraced her and, like a small child, pressed her whole body closely against her, her voice trembling:

—The midwife Schatz could hardly imagine how grateful she was to her for having come now! She, Mirel, would explain the cause of this gratitude another time.

Wine was drunk from a variety of sealed bottles which had earlier been carefully passed from hand to hand with smilingly appreciative comments on the information conveyed on their labels and lead foils.

Drinking went on uninterruptedly, both during the meal and afterward when plates were being cleared from the unusually long, damask-covered table, and Tarabay’s cousin Notte, a remarkably tall, robust grain merchant, was already drunk, red-faced, and sweating. Every now and then he’d place full new bottles on the table, and chant portentous announcements in a loud, raucous voice, in imitation of the traditional manner of auctioning o. the honor of carrying a Torah scroll round the synagogue during the festival of Simchas Torah:
*

—This one is presented by Uncle Nokhem in the name of his eldest son, Boris, who works in a bank in
L
odz, and will, God willing, soon become the di—rec—tor!

—This one is presented by Auntie Nechamka for her eldest daughter, Tanya, who passed her matriculation examination before Suk—kot.

Through the haze of smoke from a multitude of cigarette butts, the lamps flickered and burned dimly.

The confused murmur of thirty drunken voices filled the room and hung in the air, rendering barely audible the occasional yell that accompanied two bottles clinked together, and the burly grain merchant with his long, flapping arms continued to strain his voice, driving genteel, worldly people to grimace in distaste:

—This one is presented by Uncle Nokhem in honor of his younger son, Isak, who will, God willing, in two years’ time qualify as an en—gin—ee—er.

Seated at this noisy table, Mirel experienced something wholly unforeseen:

The family’s guest, the polytechnic student with the licentious grinning face who didn’t look in the slightest sober, was exchanging salacious winks about her with one of the young men in deep-cut evening waistcoats:

—Might one risk it, d’you think, eh?

With the crude grin of a village peasant, he seated himself on one of the unoccupied chairs beside her at the very moment at which, with a gravely sorrowful expression, she was glancing indifferently at the row of people opposite. He stole a nastily lascivious sidelong glance at her décolletage and with equally nasty lasciviousness coughed into the fist which he grinningly brought up to his mouth:

—Nosn Heler’s a very fine fellow and good-looking as well, eh?

He started telling her something about how that idler Nosn Heler had failed the matriculation examinations for which they’d prepared together; about the fact that Nosn Heler’s recently deceased parents had left him no more than five or six thousand rubles as his inheritance, and about how Heler, that frivolous, good-looking loafer, was now drifting about without employment in the metropolis and was considering accepting one of the two marriage proposals that had been suggested to him.

—Fifteen thousand rubles—he related—that’s the kind of dowry he’s been offered.

All this time, Mirel did not once turn to look at him, pretended not to hear, and with gravely sorrowful eyes continued to glance indifferently at the row of people opposite.

Suddenly she became aware that this half-drunken lout was moving his chair closer and closer to her under the table, was slowly placing his foot on hers, and was equally slowly starting to press that foot down.

Instantly flustered and burningly red, she sprang up from her seat with a cry:

—
Ne smeete!
Don’t you dare!

An overwhelming feeling of anger and insult threw her entire being into turmoil. Her confused mind was filled with disconnected thoughts, her heart pounded too rapidly, and she took too much pleasure from the infinite disgust with which she finally shouted:

—You sot!

At this cry, people rose hastily from the table. Her former fiancé’s family, casting glances at her, started whispering among themselves, and on the other side of the table the ironically smiling midwife began chatting to someone. But all this was a matter of unconcern to Mirel, who was unable to focus her mind on it.

With her back pressed closely to the wall, she stood alone at the very end of the deserted salon and slowly surrendered to an awareness of her own fall from grace:

—It really wasn’t worthwhile … This whole stupid evening had probably not been worthwhile.

Some thought absorbed her entire attention as she stood with her back pressed closely to the wall, looking down with sorrowful, pensive eyes at a distant yellow stain on the floor:

—At bottom, this evening wasn’t actually the central, overriding concern …

For some time now she’d felt the slow, painful demise of her vapid, commonplace, self-absorbed life. She felt it as she wandered idly about with Lipkis, and she felt it also in thinking for hours at a stretch about that wealthy young man named Shmulik Zaydenovski.

Meanwhile the full drunken uproar had carried through from the dining room to the salon. Creatures the worse for liquor with red, sweaty faces were all clamoring at the same time, demanding something as they surrounded the piano that stood in the opposite corner of the salon, shoving each other and yelling for Tanya Tarabay:

—It’s all right! … It’s all right!

—She won’t be able to get out of it!

The drunken tumult slowly died away until it was finally choked in company with the hoarse, huckster’s bellowing of Tarabay’s cousin, the grain merchant:

—Quiet! Quiet! The
barishniya
Tanya will play something in honor of the guests.

In the silence that suddenly ensued, an expectant pause was followed by the first hushed, haunting tones of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 1, which made their way in quietly and modestly, embarrassed by the crude buffoonery that had preceded them and smiling about it with childlike naïveté to those gentle bass chords with which they had been intimately acquainted for so long:

—How did those bass chords feel now? Didn’t they somehow feel oddly disgusted by all these persons who were listening?

Now no one ventured to break this haunting silence, and only from the opposite corner, near the door, the drunken elderly Pole, unable to hold his tongue, was pestering someone else, still openly flattering the shrewd Tarabay, almost shaking himself to bits with drunken enthusiasm:

—A to szelma, ten Pan Tarabay … szelma …

Then, crashing abruptly across this stillness, came the voice of the woman who should have been Mirel’s mother-in-law:

—Look here! Wherever can Reb Nokhem have got to?

This gross woman stood alone in the middle of the salon, busily and distractedly peering about for a glimpse of Tarabay:

—She needed Reb Nokhem so urgently.

From among the dense crowd surrounding the piano, Mirel’s former fiancé went over to her and led her politely over to a side of the room:

—Hush! Just look at her … You’ll see Reb Nokhem a little later on.

At length Mirel left the salon and made her way despondently through the adjacent darkness to the dining room. She needed to find someone there:

—Yes, she needed to find the midwife Schatz there.

But entering another darkened room nearby, she saw her former fiancé and his parents gathered around Nokhem Tarabay near the door and instantly drew back. His father was explaining something to Tarabay:

—He’s left the matter in my hands … He’s said to me: take the dowry and deposit it where you wish.

And with her voice choked with tears, his wife supported him:

—Let Reb Nokhem be spared to a long life, and let the dowry be deposited with him … She no longer wanted to deposit money with Gentile landowners … She’d been punished once already.

Mirel retreated through the salon to the dining room, found the midwife there in an unusually jovial, half-tipsy state, and was deeply offended by the smell of wine on her breath:

—Well? Didn’t the midwife Schatz ever intend to go home?

They donned their overcoats and, seated in Reb Gedalye’s old sleigh, traveled home, moving out of the sleeping village into the surrounding night at a regular pace.

As he drove, the little Gentile lad wept quietly and with foolish simple-mindedness, complaining about the burly, smartly uniformed coachmen who’d playfully shoved him from one to another in the kitchen and the stable, and from all sides had kept rapping him on the head with their knuckles.

The tipsy midwife Schatz, on the other hand, went on laughing and chattering immoderately.

Mirel sat beside her in deep despondency. She glanced across to where the lamps of the sugar refinery patiently guarded its brickwork depots, feeling the emptiness of the days that had passed together with the emptiness of those that would start stretching out from tomorrow:

—Is this the end, then? … The end of everything? …

When Mirel eventually drove up to their house in the shtetl, knocked softly on the shutters of the kitchen window, and went quietly indoors, Gitele heard her crossing the dining room on tiptoe and in a very sleepy voice called out to her from her bedroom:

—There’s a telegram on the table … a telegram from your father.

Mirel went over to the table, turned up the lamp and opened it:

—Reb Gedalye was returning home … He’d be back tomorrow afternoon.

For some reason she did not go to her own room, but with the telegram in her hand sat down on the sofa and, for the first time in a long while, thought about Reb Gedalye.

—At present she didn’t love even him, her own father …

She felt only great compassion for his neglected illness, which doctors had continually been urging him to deal with, and for his unfortunate and muddled business affairs.

—It was said that he’d already made a mess of so much money, both his own and what had come to him by marriage … he was probably facing massive bankruptcy … But she, Mirel … she was unhappy herself, and quite unfit for any kind of work.

—She was quite unable to help him in any way.

Pale light was already seeping through the cracks in her shutters when she finally undressed in her own room and retired to bed. Somewhere far away, in the strained silence of this Friday dawn over the sleeping shtetl, the jingling bells on Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s sleighs, returning and offloading their passengers, spread the deflated mood of in-laws returning from a wedding. And for some reason, at this early hour in the house here, Gitele was already up and dressed, and by the light of the lamp had started pacing about the dining room.

This was very odd:

In unyielding silence this elderly, taciturn, stubborn creature had always loved her preoccupied husband and yearned for him. Now, evidently, she was greatly excited that he was coming back, had passed a restless night, and by pacing about, was hoping to shorten the time remaining until his return.

For the whole of that Sabbath, Reb Gedalye Hurvits had every reason to be content with his home. On Saturday night he peered cheerfully over his gold-rimmed spectacles at neighborhood acquaintances and former partners who’d called to see him, and even in his distracted frame of mind he shared a witty remark with them:

—Yes, while he was abroad they’d taken him for a young bachelor … they’d even wanted to arrange marriages for him over there.

In reality, while he’d been abroad he’d lost a great deal of weight, acquired the shadowed complexion of the terminally ill, and had brought back with him many bottles of medicine, a small nickel vaporizer, and the diagnosis of a dangerous, progressive illness. The bottles stood in a tedious row on the windowsill of his study as a silent reminder of the indifference of the foreign professors: