The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (20 page)

—In every letter he begged to be informed of how she was.

Because this old bachelor wasn’t overly intelligent, because no rational person was capable of paying this foolish, small-town social call, Mirel found it frightfully tedious to sit here in the salon with him, and she was irritated both by his tales about Nosn Heler and by the suspicious glances with which Gitele continually kept hovering in the doorway. She wrapped herself in her shawl and kept wishing for him to go, and when he finally did leave, she found the whole house as intolerable as the betrothal party that was being prepared there, the whole of her future life, and Gitele’s questions:

—What did he want, that young man?

In agitated anger she responded:

—Let her mother quickly get a rider to saddle up and gallop after him to ask what he wanted.

She went off to her room, undressed, and retired to bed very early that evening. Several days yet remained before the betrothal party: something might yet happen before then, and even now she had absolutely no obligation to think about him, that wealthy young man named Shmulik Zaydenovski, or about the unpleasant new experiences awaiting her.

Before she fell asleep, a thought of Heler unexpectedly flashed into her mind, and the whole night thereafter she dreamed of his oblong face which made him look like a Romanian. Around ten o’clock at night he was wandering alone somewhere in the great city, that provincial capital in which he lived, was on his way to visit a friend who lived at the opposite end of town, and all the way there could think of nothing but his friend’s warm, well-lighted room.

There one could sit for a long time with a glass of tea and pensively and with great longing relate:

—In a little shtetl somewhere far, far away lived a young woman named Mirel Hurvits. She once loved me, this Mirel Hurvits … she once loved me very deeply.

She recalled his features all the next wintry day, recalled them vaguely and with shadowy fondness, and drew the thought close to her heart. But in the house the approaching betrothal party made itself increasingly strongly felt. In her bedroom the noise of tables being moved about in the adjacent rooms, of someone complaining and calculating could all be heard:

—What do you think? We’ll really have problems if there are more than three in the Zaydenovskis’ party.

So she no longer had any desire to hold Nosn Heler’s features in her mind’s eye and made every effort to dwell on the fact that Shmulik Zaydenovski looked like a European:

—She’d thought of this once before … Walking out with him in the provincial capital she’d thought of it.

Together with the bridegroom, their eldest child, they arrived on Friday afternoon, the middle-aged parents who lived at the quiet end of a suburb in the distant metropolis, bringing with them a refined, barely concealed smile of inward self-satisfaction and the bridegroom’s seven-year-old little sister, their late-born youngest daughter. This smile later became seductive: it appeared even on the faces of total strangers from the town, making the Zaydenovskis appear deeply good-natured, and compelling everyone to reach the same conclusion:

—These people, these prospective in-laws, loved each other very much … Years before they’d even made pilgrimages to Sadagura together, and to this very day they loved each other even more than the newly betrothed couple.

Like an adult, the seven-year-old little girl changed her dresses far too frequently, and clambered onto her mother’s chair too often every time her parents told the story of how she’d contradicted an elderly general in the second-class railway carriage they’d occupied.

—Since her older daughter—the mother-in-law-to-be related—was completing her schooling at the
gymnasium
this year; she was obliged to study and had no time to spare, but they’d brought this one, their youngest, so she could enjoy herself a little.

Looking deeply into the child’s face, her mother blinked her little black eyes rapidly like some short-sighted night bird and, peering with menacing suspicion at a black spot on the child’s nose, demanded in her hoarse voice:

—How d’you like the bride? Have you seen her yet?

Sitting in polite silence opposite, Gitele scrutinized her:

She was a tall, scrawny, somewhat worn woman with a dull, saturnine complexion on the elongated face of a well-to-do bourgeoise, a small, very dull mind, and extraordinarily big hands and feet. The huge heirloom hairpin in her chestnut-colored horsehair wig bore a diamond and was evidently valuable, but since she herself had no conversation, she went on smiling excessively in self-satisfaction and began the same account from the very beginning every time:

—Well, as soon as the telegram arrived, just as the Purim feast was about to begin, in fact … and as always there were some fifteen people at our feast … well then he, Yankev-Yosl that is, gave the instruction immediately, of course: Wine! Bring up the wine! (He’d laid down wine in the cellar in the very year Shmulik was born.) Well, you can imagine …

A little farther away, at an open volume that lay on the little bookshelf, stood the slim, twenty-four-year-old bridegroom in company with the family’s intimate, the bookkeeper. He was in awe of the florid Hebrew style of the bookkeeper’s two letters which had reached him at home, regarded him as a
maskil
,
*
and therefore spoke loudly about Ahad Ha’am
^†
to show that he too was an educated man:

—Do you understand? Ahad Ha’am is quite capable of publishing nothing for a whole year.

He wore a still-youthful reddish-blond beard, which, freshly trimmed and bypassing his ears, merged with the chestnut-brown hair on his head and stretched round his face like a taut leather strap. Yet he closely resembled his thickset, powerful father, that brisk, cheerful, dark individual of medium height and middle age with his huge, intensely black untrimmed beard and sharp, lacquer-black eyes. When tea was served, this cheerful soon-to-be relative by marriage openly and generously embraced Reb Gedalye, barely restrained himself from kissing him, and perhaps compensated for this by abruptly bellowing across to Gitele in his rich baritone:

—My dear mother of the bride! You’ll soon see the quality of the six sponge cakes we’ve brought you for the party.

Preparations for attending evening prayers to welcome the Sabbath were made.

By now, meanwhile, seated between the mothers of the bridal couple was Libke the rabbi’s wife with her visiting mother-in-law, a woman with a homely face who’d lost her front teeth in early youth and wore a silk kerchief on her head. This woman was at a loss about what to do with her rough, work-worn hands, and was anxious to hide one of her thumbs which had for many years a useless sixth finger growing from it. Next to the groom’s father, Avreml the rabbi was smiling and twisting one of his curly earlocks. He took pleasure from the fact that in honor of the Sabbath the groom’s father wore a black silk surtout,
^†
albeit somewhat shortened, and from the fact that well-to-do observant Jews were still to be found in the world. In consequence, he shyly and quietly expressed an opinion in passing:

—In the study-house, the worshipers would almost certainly desire Reb Yankev-Yosl to favor them by leading the prayers … They almost certainly still vividly recalled the way he’d led the prayers during the High Holy Days in Sadagura.

And smoking the last cigarette of Friday afternoon, the worldly relative-to-be assumed an expression of seeming reluctance:

—Who? Was he to lead the congregation in prayer? God forbid!

He wanted to be begged.

Suddenly all in the room rose from their places. The father-in-law-to-be forgot completely about the rabbi and from a distance began bowing in a worldly manner to Mirel who, clad in a long gray silk gown, made her appearance here in the dining room for the first time. Her blue eyes smiled at her newly arrived prospective in-laws, but her freshly washed face was pale with exhaustion and looked somewhat older than it really was. To the eye of a stranger she seemed to be no artless girl, but an unusually passionate young wife who’d been living for three or four years with a husband whom she loved to distraction and to whom she unreservedly gave herself with great devotion; that because of this her refined face appeared so weary and pale with exhaustion, despite the fact that she’d only just spent a long time refreshing it with ice-cold water and applying all manner of lotions.

The prospective father-in-law paid no attention to what she smilingly said to him with her newly freshened blue eyes. He half-turned to Reb Gedalye:

—What? Time for prayers? Yes, he was ready.

And when he turned to face her again, she’d already forgotten about him. She stood at the window opposite Shmulik and smiled at him with the same newly freshened blue eyes:

—After he’d left the provincial capital, she’d been there once on another occasion and she’d wandered through the deserted streets all alone. When had this been? She’d remember in a moment.

But already thinking about something else, she was wholly unable to recall, suddenly hurried off to her own room again where she once more did something to her pale face, then returned to the dining room and suggested to Shmulik, who hadn’t gone to prayers for her sake:

—Did he perhaps feel like putting on his skunk fur overcoat and taking a walk through the shtetl with her?

In various places afterward, girls in shawls dawdling in front of their fathers’ houses saw them both strolling through the shtetl, leaving the main street and making their way to the back alleys with their illuminated study-houses where the Sabbath was being welcomed. All around these study-houses, crooked windows sealed with clay displayed the little flames of their Sabbath candles to the late evening air. At one such window, two young women, shortly to be brides, who’d gone to visit their neighbor, stood with their hostess watching Mirel and her husband-to-be, wanted very much to catch a glimpse of Shmulik’s face and couldn’t. And quite by chance, a young wife who was standing outside saw Mirel stopping with her husband-to-be in front of the clay-caulked door of Lipkis’s house and pointing it out to him:

—A very close friend of hers lived here; his name was Lipkis and he was a student. But he was very poor and walked with a limp.

On Sabbath morning, the town learned that Reb Gedalye’s relative by marriage would lead the congregation in prayer. By the time of the Additional Service,
*
the Husiatyn study-house
^†
was packed with householders from both prayer houses as well as from the big artisan’s synagogue. Listening to the way this relative by marriage unhurriedly ended one series of blessings and moved equally unhurriedly on to another, those in the backmost rows stood on tiptoe to get a better view, but owing to the height of the central reading desk could see no more than the tip of the gold-embroidered collar on his prayer shawl, and reflected on the good fortune of this middle-aged, big-city magnate: there at the eastern wall his son, the bridegroom, was standing next to Reb Gedalye, while he himself led the prayers in a strong, pleasant voice:

—He led the prayers like the very best cantors.

The fatigue induced by the lengthy service hung in the air over the heads of the congregation. High above, the brick walls of the study-house oozed moisture; curtained off, the Holy Ark looked down from the eastern wall in hallowed Sabbath weariness; and the face of the beadle, who kept banging on the desk before every prayer in order to intensify the silence, gleamed from the height of the central reading desk.

They left the study-house late, around one o’clock, and hurried home, feeling weak from the gnawing pangs of hunger.
*
For the rest of the day, the entire shtetl lived as though in a Sabbath dream, remembering the in-laws-to-be and the bridegroom who were staying with Reb Gedalye, and the betrothal party that would be held that evening.

Warmly dressed young women certainly felt excessively festive this winter Sabbath and spent far too long parading up and down the long street onto which the front windows of Reb Gedalye’s house looked out. Only some way off, near the beginning of the marketplace, the big house with the blue shutters belonging to Avrom-Moyshe Burnes, the father of Mirel’s former fiancé, stood strangely isolated and abandoned. Every joyful melody that the Husiatyn Hasidim sang in Reb Gedalye’s house caused it distress. No one entered it and no one left it throughout that entire Sabbath, and it gazed out as though rigorously banned from all social contact. Velvl Burnes himself was assuredly not there but was spending the day somewhere or other on his farm. Nevertheless, it was now common knowledge in town that he was breaking off with his second fiancée, and that what he himself went round telling everyone—that his wedding had been postponed until the Sabbath of Consolation
*
—was merely to save face.

That Saturday night, Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s house was brightly lit and filled to overflowing with many wealthy guests, both local and from out of town. In the entrance hall, several of Reb Gedalye’s shockingly impoverished agents derived great pleasure from these guests, were delighted that their employer still had good friends, and after each new arrival, cheerily cadged a smoke off one another:

—What d’you say about that one, eh? … Also not a pauper, eh? Give us a cigar.

There was a crush around the big circular table that stretched from the hallway to the widely opened doors of the well-lighted salon. At its head, between the parents of bride and groom, his face freshened from the cold outside, sat the perpetually cheerful Nokhem Tarabay. He’d only just arrived in his own sleigh and had no hesitation in personally telling the groom’s father, Yankev-Yosl, that he wished Reb Gedalye well and had therefore come to his daughter’s betrothal party, even on a Saturday night. He’d been on the road until ten o’clock, had even taken a wrong turn somewhere in the dark behind a sleeping village, but had made his way here despite it all. Now he made a boisterous commotion with his merry hand-clapping, his nimble capering about, and the fatuous questions with which he continually attempted to animate the oddly morose Reb Gedalye: