The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (30 page)

This particular idiosyncrasy sprang from the fact that good-natured Shmulik was as naïve as a child. This was the first time he’d met this young doctor, a relative whom he’d never so much as seen in his life before, yet he was immediately on familiar terms with him and in all seriousness insisted:

—Naum, come and spend the Sabbath with me, please do, Naum! Have your ticket stamped to show that you’ve interrupted your forward journey, Naum!

From the master’s study, with one of the master’s cigarettes in his mouth, now emerged a middle-aged man, a tall, partially observant matchmaker wearing a surtout too wide for him, a narrow oblong beard, and an expression of Sabbath contentment on his face; he had a predilection for making himself appear more idiotic than he really was. At the big table he caught a few words of the conversation being conducted there and instantly began loudly asserting:

—What? Women students? Might all his prayers for a good year be answered as surely as all of them were practically dying to get married. At first they pretended to deny this and mocked the idea, but as soon as they saw a serious possibility developing, they stopped laughing and burned with eagerness instead … as true as he was a Jew.

These remarks were directed at Shmulik’s sister Rikl. On the other side, with a shawl over her shoulders, Mirel’s mother-in-law sat at the head of the table stupidly blinking her eyes. A little earlier, before Mirel’s arrival, she’d been murmuring complaints in the ear of the former student Miriam:

—But the whole business was troubling … She went to town every day, that Mirel, so why shouldn’t she sometimes ask Shmulik to go with her?

Now she’d told an elderly woman about two young female students who’d rented a room in town from Uncle Ezriel-Meir’s daughter:

—Uncle Ezriel-Meir’s daughter says that very often a male student calls on these girls late in the evening and stays overnight.

A little farther on, in the middle of the large room, stood the master’s youngest brother, Sholem Zaydenovski, a perpetually discontented young man with a saturnine complexion and the appearance of an overgrown yeshiva student who’d only recently shortened both his earlocks and his surtout. He stood there completely alone, regarding the company carefully and patiently as though he were not part of it, and maintaining a supercilious silence. After the death of his fanatically observant parents not long before, he’d found himself to be nothing more than a partially agnostic, venomous freethinker, had married for the sake of her dowry a lanky young woman no longer in the first bloom of youth whom he’d rejected for three consecutive years, had moved with her to a nearby shtetl which was home to a wonder-working rabbi, and had there been forced to open a warehouse that sold planks. Toward money he now felt a deep antipathy coupled with a shopkeeper’s pathological love for it that was his genetic inheritance, believed that no one was as capable of making it as he was, and for this reason held an uncommonly negative opinion of Jewish youth:

—Our people are quite incapable of producing any healthy types.

From the outset he’d behaved badly and with hostility toward Mirel, as though he could never bring himself to forgive her for marrying his brother’s foolish son, Shmulik. Not once the whole evening did he look at her, though her beautiful, sad face and troubled blue eyes excited him; at length he went over to young Lyubashits, the student, who was seated not far from Mirel and commented to him in a tone suggesting that he was speaking of an incident that had lately taken place before his very eyes on one or another of the city’s bustling streets:

—Yes … from childhood on these young people grow up among us thinking: I will be a prince … somewhere there’s a princess waiting for me …

Montchik arrived from town. He came in late, preoccupied, with the appearance of someone who’d dropped down from an extraterrestrial world. Some kind of profitable piece of business had only just slipped out of his hands, so his mind was still in town, brooding over ways and means to save this little money-spinner, while his glazed eyes stared vacantly into the lamp. At first he was wholly unconscious of the way his young female relatives were giggling and jostling each other behind his back, how every now and then one or another of them furtively tugged at his jacket or pushed orange peel down the back of his collar. When he did finally turn round, they were all laughing loudly at him, and only the former student Miriam Lyubashits made any effort to keep a straight face as she joked:

—Shame on you, Montchik! … I’ve been asking you a question for the past half hour … What’s wrong? Why don’t you answer me?

Only then did Montchik remember that he was hungry, and start thinking back in puzzlement:

—Just a moment: he certainly hadn’t yet drunk any tea this evening. But what about this afternoon? … What could this mean? He hadn’t the faintest recollection of whether or not he’d eaten lunch that day.

They laughed at him again as they brought him something to eat. Without sitting down, he absently snatched a few bites and once more lost himself in thought, taking a glass of tea off its saucer and carrying it with him as he paced across the room.

At the head of the table they were still talking about “female students.” Someone had overheard the cynical way the two young women who rented a room from Uncle Ezriel-Meir’s daughter had spoken about the student who spent the night with them after he’d left them very early one morning. The mother-in-law grimaced in disgust and spat loudly, but a frisson of lust passed over the men, and they started exchanging prurient stories. Someone took Shmulik aside and began furtively describing a petite, highly passionate newlywed, a student, who’d left her husband, a traveling salesman, in Kursk, and had fallen pregnant by another man here in town. Totally oblivious of the people who filled the spacious dining room Shmulik, his face burning as he listened to this story, could be heard asking loudly:

—Really? Here? In town?

Meanwhile the dark passageway between the study and the dining room was now filled with the resounding bass of the powerful, darkhaired master of the house, still vigorous in his middle years:

—Have the horse harnessed immediately, Borukh! You still have an hour and a quarter before the train leaves.

In the dining room, silence suddenly fell. When his virile figure appeared in the doorway, everyone looked respectfully in his direction and saw him lay his hand on Montchik’s shoulder with a smiling wink:

—You’re making a big noise in the world, eh?

No one knew whether this remark was spoken in jest or in earnest. As always, Zaydenovski’s eyes gleamed as though he’d only just varnished them, and his whole bearing wordlessly repeated what everyone had long known but what he’d never openly said of himself:

—Worth half a million … not bad, eh? With a reputation throughout the entire district … And not just anybody … no, no—one of the Zaydenovskis!

From across the table where she still sat with her coat on, Mirel looked at him. This man, who loved cracking jokes, who to this day traveled to Sadagura for Yom Kippur, and whose vanity demanded that every one of the lengthy third meals he served before the conclusion of every Sabbath be attended by at least ten male guests, seemed to her at times to be nothing more than a common libertine in respectable clothing. There was reason to believe that, his observant Jewish practices notwithstanding, he was often covertly unfaithful to his wife and behaved licentiously, otherwise it was impossible to understand why every now and then he quite suddenly humbled his proud, stubborn nature and treated even his own little children with gentle timidity.

At last he noticed her, his first daughter-in-law, approached her with a smile and an ingratiating move, and began joking with her in a tone suggesting that only he was privy to the deep secret that she was absolutely no wife to his son:

—Ah … Mirele … how are you getting on with running a household?

All looked in that direction, smiled, and kept silent. Only the former student Miriam Lyubashits, who’d deliberately obscured herself behind someone’s back, quietly responded for Mirel with a witticism, to which no one paid any attention, in an attempt to attract Uncle Yankev-Yosl’s attention to herself.

There was general laughter at the father-in-law’s facetious notions:

—Could Mirel imagine what would happen if she were suddenly to dismiss her cook and were then unable to engage another one?

—
After all, a
zabastovke
, a workers’ strike, of cooks, for example, was certainly conceivable.

The only one who didn’t laugh was the father-in-law’s arrogant, deeply malicious brother, Sholem. Hugely puffed up with his own selfimportance, with a contemptuous conviction that all these people around him were wholly incapable of understanding either his penetrating intellect or the reason for his hatred of people, he stood to one side, isolated from everyone else, and said nothing. With his head at a slight angle and his right hand thrust between the buttons of his tightly fastened surtout, he fixed his eyes malevolently on Mirel as though regarding her from a great height. Among the whole company assembled here, he alone regarded his older brother as a vain and commonplace social climber, but knew that no one here except himself would understand this and consequently had no wish to speak about it. He lowered his head still further, thrust out his broad shiny chin on which hair rarely grew, began arrogantly pacing about the room, and made not the slightest reply, even to the former student Miriam, who regarded him as a skinflint and who had been pursuing him for several minutes with the same tedious question:

—Sholem, when do you say we should come to visit you?

The father-in-law was no longer in the room. The rest of the company had reverted to behaving with too much jollity and lack of restraint, and Mirel still sat at the table in her overcoat. All at once she became conscious of Sholem Zaydenovski’s glance resting on her yet again, and quite unexpectedly, even to herself, she sprang to her feet.

Taking leave of no one in the house, she made her way home alone and was still unable to calm herself:

—No, she’d eventually have to tell this yeshiva student that he was a great blockhead or some other word to the same effect.

Even after she’d undressed in her room and retired to bed she continued to feel thoroughly disconcerted:

—Now Sholem Zaydenovski’s glances were beginning to affect her … and the overriding concern …

The overriding concern was that every day she felt something ought to be done, but didn’t know what or how. Every day she thought she’d know what it was the next day, but the next day she failed again because she still found herself under the same roof as Shmulik, and was still his wife. Sooner or later she’d have to find some means of escape from this whole existence.

There was nothing more—

—Other people spent years looking for the same means of escape, and when they failed to find it, they eventually took their own lives, leaving behind half-foolish, half-perceptive notes.

Well after midnight, she fell into a light sleep. The house was very dark and quiet. Somewhere in the kitchen at the other end of the corridor the maid, who’d fallen into a deep sleep still fully dressed, began snoring loudly, and the cat began tumbling a cube of sugar over the floor, with the result that Mirel was unable to drift off into forgetfulness. The end of her last thought kept repeating itself in her drowsy mind:

—When they failed to find it, they eventually took their own lives, leaving behind half-foolish, half-perceptive notes.

She couldn’t recall how long this restless dream lasted.

Half-asleep she suddenly felt a cold hand brush against her bare back. Her whole body shuddered and she opened her eyes.

The bedroom was brightly lit by the study lamp that had been carried in, and next to the bed, in his underwear, stood Shmulik, hunched over, trembling and smiling. He’d been aroused by the suggestive tales he’d been hearing all evening about the pregnant little newlywed from Kursk.

For a while Mirel stared at him in fright.

—What do you need here, Shmulik?

Very soon the reason he was standing here next to her bed became clear to her, and a flame of stubbornness and resentment instantly kindled in her eyes:

—Shmulik, take a pillow and lie down in the study at once.

A pause.

—Do you hear what I say, Shmulik?

Without moving, hunched over and half-naked, Shmulik still stood there, trembling and grinning foolishly. But now Mirel had the button of the electric bell in her hand and was ringing without pause for the snoring maid in the kitchen. The shrilling bell seemed set to shatter the whole house to smithereens before the maid’s bare feet could be heard slapping over the floor. Then in discomfited embarrassment Shmulik took up a pillow and went off to his study. The maid carried the lamp out of the bedroom and extinguished it, and darkness and desolation once again descended on the house. Someone, it seemed, was weeping with suppressed sobs torn from the very depths of the heart. But for anyone who might have sat up in bed and listened attentively, all that could be heard was the cat tumbling the cube of sugar over the floor and the regular breathing of the snoring maid.

The next day Mirel rose late, at about eleven o’clock in the morning.

From the kitchen came the sound of rapid chopping, and in the courtyard the britzka that had conveyed Shmulik to the distillery as dawn was breaking had already been unharnessed. The father-in-law’s most trusted servant, his coachman, spent a long time fussing over the returned britzka, shouted at Shmulik’s little brother for getting under the horse’s feet and at the mother-in-law’s Gentile maid for throwing dirty kitchen water into the freshly swept courtyard. The mother-in-law herself stood there wondering why Shmulik had taken himself off to the distillery so early and inquiring after a letter from the yelling coachman. A short while later, when Mirel passed through the courtyard, no one was there. By then the quiet of the working week rested over all the locked stables, the coachman was sitting somewhere in the kitchen and for some reason only the unharnessed, well-sprung britzka, with its shaft still in place, stood in the middle of the freshly swept courtyard wordlessly calling to mind Shmulik, who’d gone away: