The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (19 page)

Lying in bed, she flung her slender, supple body so far back that all the blood rushed to her face; exposing her arms to the shoulders, she slowly examined them from all sides and equally slowly began caressing them.

—Such beautiful arms … She felt so sorry for them every time she thought of suicide.

At this, the midwife suddenly remembered that she’d forgotten to buy a box of sardines in town. She abandoned the soaking handkerchiefs and once again dashed off:

—How thoughtless she’d become lately! … Mirel would simply starve to death, living with her!

In her rush into town, she found time to pop in to see the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan for a moment to pick up a new, recently published book for Mirel to read. But Mirel was wholly indifferent to it, took it up apathetically, and from where she lay in bed read the opening two sentences aloud in a monotone. Almost at once she let the book fall from her seemingly nerveless hands, and with curious despondency began yet again staring at the window as she spoke:

—All these writers love starting their books with the sorrow-filled springtime of someone’s youth and so intensify everyone else’s sorrow. And after a pause, and a sigh, more in the same vein:

—When one’s heart was light, one forgave them and read them. But when one found oneself in so depressed a mood as hers now was, every phrase seemed like an unrelenting fly that settled on one’s nose and persistently irritated one with the reminder: “But you feel awful … awful … . awful …”

One evening, though, the midwife took up the small, ancient copy of
Dicta sapientium
*
that an elderly Catholic noblewoman had given her as a gift not long before, sat down with it on the bed next to Mirel, and began reading a chapter from the yellowed, tear-stained pages, translating and explaining one sentence after another:

—
Omnis felicitas mendacium est
^†
…

The two young women suddenly seemed like mourners, and it looked as though they were drawing comfort from reading to each other from the Book of Job: there were, if one reflected, greater sorrows to be found elsewhere in the world.

Nevertheless, this reading made the illuminated room a little more cheerful and lifted the mood of depression for a time. With a smile, the midwife Schatz even rolled herself a cigarette at the box of tissue papers, returned to smoke it sitting next to Mirel on the bed, and recalled her acquaintance, the writer:

—He’d told her once: Nowadays, happiness is only to be found among traveling salesmen. This would be deplorable if it didn’t have its own consolation: such people were always so busy playing cards that they were unaware of it.

And both kept silent for a while, taking their revenge on these traveling salesmen:

—They weren’t even aware of their good fortune.

Mirel even smiled at this:

—
Eto khorosho
. That’s good.

But her smile was oddly feeble, too akin to the grimace that sometimes precedes tears.

In town, meanwhile, the fact that she was living with the midwife Schatz kept tongues wagging ceaselessly. In Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s house, excessive pleasure was taken from this, and every recently arrived guest who might have something new to tell was joyfully accosted:

—Well, what’s happening? What else had he discovered?

In his own house, Reb Gedalye was profoundly vexed, and continually consulted his relative the bookkeeper about it:

—He’d be quite frank with him: he could hardly wait for Gitele to return. Gitele was the only person who was capable of sorting this out … not so?

And he rushed about all over the house in a highly agitated state of panic, continually pushing his gold-rimmed spectacles back and forth over his nose:

—Who could say? Perhaps it would be best to send Gitele a telegram asking her to return home as quickly as possible?

But very soon the Fast of Esther
*
came round on a beautiful, sunny day. The air was redolent with the warmth of winter’s end, and the frost was so limited and insubstantial that it could barely keep whole the blank white surface of snow on the surrounding fields, frolicking over it in the sunshine with myriad silver and diamond sparks.

During the course of the day a sleigh arrived at the home of the midwife Schatz, bringing her a letter from the wife of a landowner in the village:

—Her advice was sought, and if she wasn’t busy, she was asked to come.

Covertly, the midwife was all for sending the sleigh back empty and to this end had even written a letter to the landowner’s wife. But Mirel suddenly became aware of this and responded very firmly:

—No … The midwife was to go there at once.

And when the midwife began arguing, Mirel’s face grew pale with anger and for some reason she set about washing up the dirty saucers and glasses.

—If the midwife didn’t go, she’d get dressed and leave immediately.

In this silent washing up of crockery there was a clear hint that, as an only child, she was accustomed to getting her own way and was fully capable of doing what she threatened and going off somewhere else; all this apart, there was something very singular in watching her at this work.

Half an hour later, the sleigh bearing the midwife Schatz was gliding over the snow in a southwesterly direction far, far outside the shtetl, and Mirel was lying in calm despondency on the bed. In a quiet monotone, she invited the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan, who’d only just come in, to be seated, and just as quietly responded to his inquiries:

—The midwife certainly wouldn’t return before evening.

As usual, the pharmacist’s assistant Safyan was nervous, earnest, and dour. With his bulging, colorless eyes he looked not at her but somewhere into a corner of the room, evidently thought ill of the midwife, and was silent. After his departure, a heavy emptiness remained behind in the room. The silence intensified. Near the window outside, two Gentile girls in boots could be heard running about, chasing each other and laughing, laughing and chasing each other.

Lost in thought, Mirel at length sat up on the bed and stared wearily at the rectangular patch of sunlight playing slowly in the middle of the floor.

Quite suddenly she dressed herself, locked the midwife’s half of the cottage, and went outside. Since it was about half past three in the afternoon, the sun was still shining in the southwest, and in its sea of light the insubstantial frost still frolicked with myriad silver and diamond sparks. The big girls in their boots were still running about, chasing each other and laughing, laughing and chasing each other.

Mirel turned left and walked slowly down toward the shtetl, from time to time looking to either side of her.

The weather was so fresh and mild. Somewhere far away, in a great, noisy city, a young mother had for the first time surely sent her three-year-old child out for a walk with the governess and the child had returned home enchanted, with its little cheeks bright red, with a fresh and smiling little face, and with a single strange new word:

—Mama,
vyesna! vyesna!
… Spring! Spring!

And here in the shtetl, next to the synagogue which stood a little farther down from the pharmacy, some Jews of various ages stood in a little huddle; patiently waiting for the Torah reading during the afternoon service that would signal the end of their fast,
*
they were delightedly watching some urchins throwing snowballs at each other.

Noticing her, these men forgot about the urchins for a while. They knew:

—She, Mirel Hurvits, had left her father’s house and was living over there … She was living with the midwife Schatz.

Slowly and wearily she walked farther down into the shtetl. In front of the house with the blue shutters that belonged to the man who should have been her father-in-law she lingered a little and saw:

Her former fiancé’s sleigh stood before the verandah and the front door, and through the back door, which led into the kitchen, the scent of freshly baked sugar pastries regularly wafted out together with the steady pounding of a few restless brass pestles, bringing to mind an approaching and long-awaited wedding:

—The groom’s a refined and reserved young man … and the bride is worthy of him … worthy … worthy …

And strangely enough:

All this awakened no sense of yearning in Mirel, and aroused no fear for her future life.

With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father’s house, and with the same icily unemotional determination she went inside. The empty rooms were all in semidarkness, and there was no one about who might notice her. Slim and sorrowful, she lingered at the door, and it occurred to her that she didn’t live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, in the World of Chaos;
*
that from childhood on she’d been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end:

Now, it seemed, she’d come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she’d come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she’d merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destination.

And now she stood once again in the very house in which she’d stood so many times before, wandering slowly from one room to another. As in times gone by, the gloom of twilight held sway, intensified, and was transmuted into haze. But in times gone by there had been people here, and now there were none. The doors between one room and another stood open; here and there a dark emptiness yawned in those corners where before one or another piece of familiar soft furniture had always stood. Mirel could see no one. No one stopped her, no one was made happier by her arrival. Something, it seemed, was too late here, had already ended. But the people? What had become of all the people?

Suddenly she noticed Reb Gedalye all alone in the semidarkness of the study. Her constricted heart was powerfully drawn to him, and she put entirely out of mind her vaguely defined resolution. Hunched over and markedly shrunken, he sat there with his back toward her, his head thrown oddly forward and his mouth open, gasping like a fish before the medicinal steam he was pumping from the nickel vaporizer he’d brought back with him from abroad. In the deepening gloom of late twilight, the little machine burned before him with a blue-green flame, a turquoise light that barely illuminated his face, wet with countless drops of sweat and condensed steam.

He stopped pumping steam and extinguished the vaporizer. Slowly he wiped his face with a handkerchief, still not sensing her presence behind him. But she was shattered. Choked with tears, she moved slowly over toward him filled with compassion for a father who’d been transformed into a helpless child.

—What had become of him!

A little while later she stood at the window with him. She wiped his face, kissed his brow, and noticed the way he kept turning weakly away from her toward the window with the whole of his hunched body trembling, sobbing quietly to himself as though fearful that he might drool:

—Wh -wh - wh - ff - ff - ff—why’ve I deserved this? Ff - ff - ff—In my old age—. - ff - ff ff ff ff

He calmed himself a little when the maid returned from town and lit lamps in both the study and the dining room. Then Mirel went out into the dining room where she found the bookkeeper and looking straight at him, paused to say:

—What did he think: if a telegram were sent to Zaydenovski immediately, could the betrothal party still be held that Saturday night? Yes? Then she’d ask him to attend to that telegram at once.

—But if he would wait a moment … She thought she’d wanted to tell him something else but had forgotten … No, no … She’d remembered now. He could go off and attend to the telegram … She’d remembered now … The key … She still had the key to the midwife’s locked cottage; she’d have to take it back directly herself.

An hour and a half later, when she returned home, she found the house brightly illuminated. Reb Gedalye was still hearing the Book of Esther read in the Sadagura prayer house, and in the dining room, next to the table with its fresh white cloth and burning candles, stood Gitele, newly arrived, her face aflame with color. Perhaps still thinking about what she’d brought back with her from her rich great-uncle, she was listening as a pious Hasid, wearing his prayer girdle,
*
was reading the Book of Esther to her:

—In those days while Mordecai sat in the king’s gate …
^†

She stopped Mirel with a gesture, wanting to ask her something, but afraid to speak out and interrupt the reading she pointed instead to a scrap of scribbled paper lying on the table.

—Well—… this … well … See if Zaydenovski’s address is correct.

And for some reason, reading over the address, Mirel made her no reply. She went off to her own room and in the darkness lay down on her bed.

What followed was impossible to believe:

In town someone swore later that the very same evening, when the midwife returned home she found Velvl Burnes’s sleigh waiting next to her darkened house. Velvl Burnes himself stood there bareheaded in the moonlight for perhaps ten minutes and could barely speak for agitation:

—He’d thought he might see Mirel here—he said.—He wanted … he wanted to tell her something … But actually … Actually, he hoped the midwife Schatz would pardon him.

Two days later, a thirty-five-year-old bachelor stopped his sleigh outside Reb Gedalye’s house and inquired from Avreml the rabbi, whom he encountered coming out:

—Does Reb Gedalye’s daughter, Mirel Hurvits, live here?

The rabbi glanced questioningly at him and at his huge sergeant-major’s mustache, followed him into the entrance hall, and watched as he took off his sheepskin coat and warmed his ice-cold nose and whiskers. The rabbi assumed that this was some new emissary from Zaydenovski who’d come in connection with the betrothal contract and the marriage. Subsequently this thirty-five-year-old bachelor, who was Nosn Heler’s uncle and who worked in the sugar refinery, sat on interminably in the salon with Mirel and, in the big-city manner, bored her until nightfall. He spoke Russian badly, like a dentist,
*
saying “s” instead of “sh” and relating that his nephew, Nosn Heler, still asked after her, Mirel, in every one of his letters: