The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (22 page)

But Gitele still refused to leave him in peace:

—He was apparently under the impression that he’d settled everything with this daughter of his … Well, let him judge for himself: she was now saying that she wouldn’t travel to the provincial capital to have her wedding clothes made. Under no circumstances, she said, would she travel there.

One Sabbath two weeks before Passover a fresh spring breeze sprang up.

The snowdrifts that poked up here and there amid the mud dried out and turned gray, and there was no clarity about what festival the church bells were ringing to honor just before sunset.

Wrapped in her mother’s black shawl, Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s reclusive daughter stood for hours on the verandah in front of her father’s house watching the peasants making their way from their village at one end of the town to the church at the other end. They walked slowly, keeping close to the Jewish houses in the long main street, seeking well-worn pathways and keeping their feet dry.

Meanwhile the yawning emptiness of approaching summer made itself increasingly felt everywhere. Constantly restless in the deserted pharmacy, the assistant Safyan set o. on a walk through the shtetl, but kept stopping with the desire to turn back. Eventually he met Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s daughter, and kept her company in a stroll over the freshly trodden pathways to the peasant cottages, avoided looking at her, yet spoke as ponderously as though he were addressing an intellectual.

—Lipkis—he said maliciously—is no longer here; eventually he came to his senses and went back to serious study in the metropolis. And Mirel Hurvits … Mirel has now been in the provincial capital for over a week, having her wedding clothes made.
Kak eto shmeshno
—it’s so ridiculous.

Avrom-Moyshe Burnes’s daughter felt uncomfortable walking with him, and made no reply. She knew—wrinkling up her nose in distaste behind his back—and the whole town remarked on it, that he was in love with the midwife at whose home her acquaintance, the Hebrew poet, was spending a few days.

But he continued to stare neurotically somewhere far in front of him and went on pursuing the same subject:

—Whom did Mirel think she was fooling: herself or the whole town?

Suddenly they saw a tall, broad-shouldered young man striding in their direction from the peasant cottages. They stopped and stared at him from a distance:

He looked like a young, well-to-do doctor who’d only recently completed his university studies but hadn’t yet started to practice.

Quite evidently this was the midwife’s guest, and it was impossible to surmise where he was going now.

Mirel, after all, hadn’t been at home for over a week. And on the outskirts of the town, which he was now approaching, there was no one to be seen, apart from a small group of Jews waiting outdoors for the Sabbath afternoon service to begin. He glanced at them from some way off, and they glanced back at him. All were silent, but when he’d passed, the men, their faces wreathed in smiles, followed his retreating figure with their eyes and started talking about him:

—What does he write, you say?

—Leaflets.

—Well, and why not? For my part, let him go on writing.

Just before sunset on an altogether dry, somewhat chilly day, Mirel unexpectedly returned from the provincial capital and found her father’s house in the disorder that always attended preparations for Passover. All the furniture had been moved from its accustomed place to one central location and covered with sheets. Gitele was negotiating their pay with the old house painter who’d whitewashed the ceilings, and with the two peasant women who’d spent the whole day washing the windows and the doors, and she’d engaged these two women to come on the following day as well. At home, meanwhile, there was news:

Very early that morning Reb Gedalye had returned from the capital, where he’d succeeded in entering into partnership with the Count’s son-in-law to run the extensive Kashperivke woods. Several times that day he’d told Gitele about this auspicious new business venture, and now, because of it, he’d closeted himself with the bookkeeper in his study, where the cleansing had been completed. There his confidant sat at the desk deep in thought and Reb Gedalye paced up and down next to him in his fur-lined slippers, repeatedly stopping with his back to the unheated stove to peer over the tops of his gold-rimmed glasses at his bookkeeper:

—Not so? A fortune could be made from the profits of these woods.

And more:

—Could he imagine how much raw material could be extracted from the three hundred
desyatins
*
in the center!

Because Reb Gedalye had succeeded in calming the household and bringing his affairs back into order, because he was now wholly engrossed in these affairs and thought about nothing else, Mirel grew steadily convinced that being engaged to be married and suffering because of it served no purpose for anyone here in the house, that everyone cared about this as little as she herself had cared about it some few weeks before, and that the wedding clothes she’d just ordered in the provincial capital were thus all as superfluous as the fact that she’d traveled there at all and lingered on for a full eight days:

—She hadn’t needed this contrived trip to the capital; from the very beginning she ought to have said that the betrothal party was foolish and that there would never be a wedding.

The bookkeeper was no longer in the study, where a lamp had now been lit. All alone in the silence there, Reb Gedalye sat at the desk, poring over the balance sheets of his new woods, and she was still pacing about in her own room, which now seemed oddly unfamiliar after the eight days she’d spent away from home. Unable either to lie down or to sit at the little table, she thought about what she would soon do:

—She’d go to Reb Gedalye in his study and tell him: “Of course no one needs this foolish betrothal any longer. The wedding will never take place no matter what, so let there be an end to it.”

She thought about this for a long time, pacing about in her room, and finally went to see Reb Gedalye in his study. She even had her opening words prepared:

—I need to speak to you about something.

But there, in Reb Gedalye’s study, something overcame her and she unexpectedly found it difficult to utter another word. At first Reb Gedalye did not look round at her, clumsily manipulating the beads on the abacus and repeating the sums aloud. When he did finally interrupt his work and turn to face her, she was suddenly struck by the tranquility that had returned to him in the last few days. Now the continuation of this tranquility depended solely on her. It could last no longer than a few minutes more. All that was needed was for her to utter a few words and he would again be profoundly miserable, frozen in his seat like a mourner who’d suffered yet another blow.

For a while she stood opposite, looking at him. And then, not responding to his question, she left the study and went back through the disarranged rooms. She postponed the matter for a while, was angry at someone, and consoled herself:

—The wedding will never take place, no matter what. The engagement contract will certainly be annulled very soon.

That evening, she sat among familiar guests in the midwife Schatz’s well-lighted cottage, and there, for the first time, she felt alone and alien.

Apart from the teacher Poliye and the midwife herself, also present was the Hebrew teacher Isak Shabad, as swarthy as a Gypsy, and Esther Finkel, the daughter of that local Jew who remained arrogant despite being unemployed and having come down in the world. She was a tall young woman with a long, sad face, who was now in her third year of study in Paris.

Burdened with a wife, the Hebrew teacher had for a long time enjoyed no social contact with anyone apart from his young pupils and, worn out after a full day’s work, he seemed to be quietly dozing to one side; this was the third time he’d waited for the midwife’s guest, the Hebrew poet, who’d left the house well before sundown and was expected back at any moment.

The young women paid him no attention. All three of them sat disconsolately next to Mirel on the little sofa next to the unheated stove, and all of them ignored her. None of them wanted to insult her, but on the other hand none of them had anything to say to her.

Esther Finkel spoke of the profession for which the Parisian university would qualify her in eight months’ time:

—In general, she could hope that one way or another she’d push on through life, and as for happiness … in Paris one grew out of the habit of thinking about excessive happiness.

Esther Finkel’s last words seemed to have some connection with Mirel. No one knew for certain exactly how, but the all-pervasive silence around the burning lamp evoked memories of some quiet, lonely event, one that had taken place on a Saturday evening two weeks before when the prospective groom and in-laws had been guests in Reb Gedalye’s house and the Husiatyn Hasidim had sung table hymns in the twilight during the third meal of the Sabbath.
*
At that time, these three young women had been strolling abreast in the fiery sunset outside the shtetl. Each was oppressed by a yearning sorrow, but together they’d all come to the same decision about Mirel:

—A young woman who was now capable of finding herself at sundown in a house where Hasidim were singing table hymns around a fiancé whom she’d met through a matchmaker … Basically, what could possibly be worth thinking about such a person?

The midwife’s guest, the Hebrew poet Herz, returned only around nine o’clock that evening. In his dark blue suit he sat at the head of the table looking down at his glass of tea. Smiling in concert with his expression was the green glint in his small, deeply set eyes, and this smile revealed something about him:

—You see, I’m a particularly clever person and believe very little in sentimentality and even less in my own talent. But now you see me at the very moment at which I’ve done something foolish: in the course of making a trip abroad, I’ve come down to visit a perfectly commonplace young woman who interests me perhaps even less than you do.

Because of his arrival, the silence in the room grew heavy and oppressive. The young women kept silent, and as a result appeared more serious and refined than they actually were. Esther Finkel had already risen to her feet, donned her overcoat, and made preparations to go home. Yesterday the midwife had informed her that Herz strongly disliked female university students, so now she was furious at leaving, especially as she recalled:

—In Paris she was personally acquainted with some of the Yiddish and Russian poets there, and none of them was as arrogant as this tall fellow with his short, fair hair.

Meanwhile the Hebrew teacher had suddenly grown excessively alert and voluble, holding forth in what he took to be a serious discussion, and expressed himself wholly unable to comprehend:

—Why should Herz be so indifferent to his own poems, many of which had been published in various anthologies?

Since Herz paid absolutely no attention to what he said, the Hebrew teacher was rendered pitiable, something he himself was quite unaware of as he went on arguing instead that what he was saying was literal truth:

—He could bring some ten or fifteen boys from his Talmud Torah
*
here tomorrow, all of whom could recite by heart Herz’s poem, “On the
Approach of Dawn.”

Herz rose to his full height from behind the table and began pacing about the room. The twinkling green glint in his eyes had vanished. Now he wanted to do something entirely different and couldn’t because Shabad and Mirel, neither of whom interested him, were still in the room. He started whispering in the midwife’s ear, asking her to rid him of Shabad who was boring him. Then Mirel reacted: something seemed to irk her, and she rose abruptly, cutting the teacher short:

—Would Shabad be willing to see her home soon?

As things turned out, in the end it was not the teacher Shabad but the midwife’s guest Herz who accompanied her home, and he had nothing to say to her. In the darkness enveloping the shtetl as it awaited the coming of Passover, the air was chilly and silent so that the last words Shabad had addressed to Mirel went on reverberating too loudly in her ears:

—Take her fiancé, for instance … Her fiancé, it’s said, knew Hebrew very well.

The darkness erased both the long, well-worn pathway and Mirel’s lissome figure, at which Herz continually stole glances: the figure of a well-to-do young woman who was engaged to be married, who was tightly sheathed in a black autumn overcoat, said nothing, avoided glancing at him, and bore within her the secret of her unknown, solitary life.

Eventually he asked:

—It would seem that she was very shortly to be married?

Then the congeries of Mirel’s despondency deepened, and depressing thoughts began filling her mind:

—The wedding … It’s still uncertain … on the whole, there’s still some doubt …

With no wish to articulate these words she did not look round at him, but he repeated his question. Resentment suddenly flared up in her; provoked, she responded somewhat truculently:

—She wanted to ask something of him … He could surely do her this small kindness and keep quiet for a little while; there wasn’t much farther to go now before they reached the first of the town’s houses, so very soon she’d no longer be afraid to walk on alone.

Now his curiosity about her was aroused, and once again the green glint twinkled in his eyes. He accompanied her much farther than the first of the town’s houses, right up to the verandah of her father’s house, in fact. But she no longer so much as glanced at him, and disappeared through the open gates of the verandah without even bidding him good night.

The following morning, returning from the post office at the opposite end of the town, Mirel met Herz walking there alone. His face now seemed to her as familiar as if she’d known him a long time. He stood at the side of the road, staring at a humble dwelling in which matzos were being baked and listening to the bustle that came from within.

When he caught sight of her, his eyes began smiling. He approached her and said: