The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) (36 page)

Shmulik was completely bewildered and took no part in this discussion. The whole of his past life seemed shrouded in a fog, like a dream, and he drifted ceaselessly about the salon hearing nothing that was said and thinking of his future life without Mirel: how every Sabbath he’d attend services in the synagogue where they wished to elect him to a trusteeship, how someone would point him out at the eastern wall:

—Sadly, that young man’s a divorcé; his first wife didn’t want him.

When at length everyone had risen from their seats and Shmulik was no longer present, Miriam Lyubashits went up very close to the urbane family friend and rapped him on the forehead with a knuckle:

—What poor understanding you have, Uncle!—she remarked, alluding to Mirel and Shmulik.—We’ve only got you to thank for making this match.

The urbane family friend felt so uncomfortable that he hunched his shoulders, pondered a moment, and began expostulating with his hands:

—How could this be? How could one know? She seemed a good child, Mirel … A very good child.

And when everyone had left the salon and only he remained behind, he wandered about alone and deep in thought, muttering to himself several times:

—How could this be? How could one know?

Around noon, the courteous family friend knocked on Mirel’s door.

He felt very uncomfortable. In the dining room the barefooted servant girl had followed him all over and given him no peace:

—Listen, Uncle, take my advice and give up wanting to knock on her door—you’ll get it in the neck if you do!

Entering Mirel’s room, he stopped and made a dignified bow, took a few more steps forward, stopped and bowed again. Since he was dressed in a black frock coat, he had nowhere to put his hands, and his good-natured face wore a sheepish smile:

—I’ve come—he said, forcing a laugh at himself—I’ve come to talk matters over with you.

In her dressing gown and slippers Mirel lay on the bed. Annoyed that this little man had obliged her to open the door for him, she was unwilling to look at him. During the two weeks that she’d locked herself up in her room her face had grown haggard, and for the entire period, to spite both herself and someone else, she’d stopped speaking completely.

She strongly resented the fact that she was still being pestered and that emissaries were now being sent to her, so she raised herself a little and said to him:

—Please be so kind as to inform my mother-in-law that as soon as I have anything new to communicate, I’ll lose no time in letting her know.

She thought the little man would leave at once, but instead he again began smiling sheepishly:

—Please understand, the heart of the matter is as follows …

Having broken into a sweat, he produced a handkerchief from somewhere, sat down on a nearby chair, and began wiping his brow back and forth:

—Yes, the whole affair is, as I’m sure you’ll understand, not pleasant for me, not pleasant at all … But please understand: the family regards me as a good friend and holds me somewhat responsible … Well … So I must.

—That means … that’s to say … . yes: among us Jews the usual way is, I say, that if a couple lives, God forbid, unhappily together, and they have no children … And here, for example, is my own daughter … yes, indeed … only a year ago she was divorced …

Now Mirel sat upright in bed. Her heart began pounding.

—Divorce?—she abruptly interrupted him—Fine, fine. Tell them, if you please, that’s fine.

The little man was bewildered. He rose from his chair without fully believing what he’d heard:

—I’ll go—he said distractedly—I’ll go and tell them.

But he stopped in the doorway, considered for a moment, then turned back to her:

—They will provide for you, your mother-in-law and Shmulik … So indeed they’d instructed him to say …

But Mirel interrupted him again:

—Fine, fine …

After the little man had gone, she threw herself back on the bed. It seemed to her that nothing had happened, so she went back to the book she’d been reading before he’d come in.

This was a thick, well-bound volume dealing with women from the Middle Ages to more modern times but she found herself unable to read it all from beginning to end because it got on her nerves. As had become habitual with her, she dipped in here and there, skipping some bits and snatching at others, while part of her mind turned over what was taking place in her mother-in-law’s house at that moment. Muddled up among the medieval castles and romantic heroines of love poems that filled her book were Miriam Lyubashits and her baby, her mother-in-law, Shmulik with his devastated expression, and the little man from out of town who’d only just been in her room and who’d left with the words:

—Does that mean divorce? … Yes, yes. He was going … He was on his way to tell them.

In the end she was obliged to put the book aside, lose herself in thought, and feel once more the powerful pounding of her heart as she sat upright in bed:

—Wait … She’d now go back to the life she’d led as a girl, before she was married …

A feeling of health and strength surged up in her. In company with the joyful pounding of her heart, this feeling grew stronger.

She uttered a little shriek, feeling the return of the Mirel she’d been two years before: all in all, she uttered only one little shriek, but with immense joy. She suddenly remembered the snow-covered fields on the outskirts of their shtetl, the snowballs she’d thrown a year before at the crippled student Lipkis, and she was suddenly overcome with the desire to wash in a great deal of fresh, ice-cold water.

Seeing the little man, the family’s good friend, passing by in the courtyard, she instantly opened the window wide and called him over:

—She’d neglected to ask him one thing more. Would he be so good as to convey the following: would they please arrange the divorce as soon as possible, and without any unnecessary formalities?

Through the open window, the overcast skies and the mournful, sodden cherry trees peered in.

A long, late autumn downpour was in progress.

The servant girl seized the moment at which Mirel left her room to make up the untidy bed and replace the books and clothes that had been strewn about all this time. Now cold air and the damp autumn ripeness outdoors filled the room in which Mirel paced up and down in the tightly laced shoes and close-fitting black dress she’d made no effort to put on for fully two weeks past. A new calmness made itself felt in every one of her slow steps, in the youthful power that the tightwaisted jacket imparted to her swelling breast, and in the thoughts of her own newfound freedom that steadily came to dominate her mind:

—Something ought to be written down … Perhaps someone ought to be informed in writing about the divorce.

Looking for notepaper on the desk, she noticed the book Herz had sent her, the pages of which hadn’t yet even been cut:

—Were she now, for instance, to send Herz a telegram, he’d come.

She didn’t touch the book and moved away from the desk. That passing thought had been irrelevant and foolish … She, Mirel Hurvits, wasn’t so petty as to be unable to keep more important thoughts in mind.

Subsequently unable to leave the house all day because of the endless downpour, she read the book about women through the ages until two o’clock in the morning. After she’d fallen asleep, she dreamed that the Middle Ages were a kind of twilight kingdom in which people all stood outdoors shouting something in unison at the moon, and where no one knew what anyone else wanted. She found herself walking alone across an open field somewhere, toward a church where a great many yelling people had congregated, demanding to know:

—Is a woman a human being or not?

But in the middle of the night she suddenly started awake and remembered that she was very shortly to be divorced from Shmulik. Once more her heart leapt in joy and in longing for the freedom of the future. Drifting off to sleep again, in her dreams she saw all around her a frighteningly dark night through which a bolt of lightning suddenly flashed; in that split second of white light, she recognized on the horizon the important new life she sought.

When she awoke again it was around ten o’clock in the morning, and everything that had happened the day before came back to her in a rush:

—Quite possibly the divorce could be arranged very quickly, perhaps even that very week.

For a while she lay in bed thinking of this.

She remembered her last dream which now seemed perfectly credible to her:

—Only one small thing was left, it seemed … All in all, there was only one small thing she still needed to grasp with both reason and emotion, and the central, overriding essence of her life, that which she’d been seeking for so long, from the time she’d been a child, would be clear to her.

That afternoon, the rain stopped pouring from the dirty brown clouds of the day before. The puce sallowness of twilight hung in the air, spreading silence around the wet, cheerfully sluiced-down houses and over the puddles that had formed on the sandy outskirts of the suburb.

Appearing out of nowhere, barefoot Gentile boys herded their white geese while at the top of his voice a young man, one of the householders of the suburb, was discussing the newly arrived little wagonload of furniture which had only just been delivered to his door:

—That little sideboard’s a first-class piece of work; it’s made of oak, that little sideboard is.

Mirel dressed and went o. to town on foot across the chain bridge.

There she stopped in at the main post office and wrote a few words to Herz. She had a strong desire to tell someone—anyone—about her new situation, but to write to her parents at home was premature and futile.

Returning from the post office along the central avenue, she noticed Montchik coming out of a building in the distance:

—There’s Montchik.

She slowed her pace and a faint smile flitted across her face.

All Montchik had left to do was to call in at one particular bank that stayed open until half past four. But this was hardly important! If he’d now had the good fortune to bump into Mirel, the bank and all his business affairs could go to the devil. He’d not seen Mirel for so long now, and it would give him great pleasure to stroll up and down the avenue with her. Mirel wasn’t aware of what had taken place: he was no longer able to call on those in the suburb, not on his uncle and not on Shmulik … They’d simply become unendurable, those Zaydenovskis … No, wait … It was truly a great pleasure to have met her here … Only that morning, someone had approached him at the stock exchange to contribute to the Jewish National Fund.
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Understandably, he, Montchik, hadn’t wanted to do so … How could he contribute when he was unconditionally opposed to Zionism? But now he’d seek out the person who’d approached him and make a contribution, on his word of honor.

—He’d give him a full twenty-five rubles.

The normally preoccupied Montchik was greatly excited and very happy. His great black eyes gleamed and twinkled in sheer high spirits, and several times in his delight he so far forgot himself as to attempt to take her arm and squeeze her hand.

Looking at her with joyful, smiling eyes, he finally stood still:

—Could Mirel imagine how much pleasure he derived from having met her now?

For a little while he stood looking at her in this way. Then he doubled over on the spot and burst into loud laughter:

—Couldn’t Mirel see how delighted he was?

Mirel walked slowly along with him, a faint smile flitting across her face. She knew that there, in the Zaydenovskis’ home, they remained convinced to this day:

—Montchik was in love with her and wanted to alienate her from Shmulik.

But he, Montchik himself …

Though he might never express his feeling aloud, he was perhaps more devoted than all those of her former admirers who’d paid court to her, and was possibly her very best, true friend.

—You’re a good boy, Montchik.

Suddenly she slowed her pace even more and said:

—Montchik, do you know that I’m divorcing Shmulik?

This didn’t fully register with him. He stopped, assumed a grave expression, and fixed his huge eyes on her. A little earlier he’d wanted to ask her how she’d been during the time he’d not seen her, but some foolishness had entered his head and his mind wandered.

At first he assumed she was joking, but then he seemed to freeze, and his huge eyes were no longer fixed on Mirel but on some distant point ahead of him.

—No, wait … That’s very strange … It’s … God knows what it is.

Mirel was obliged to touch his hand and remind him that he’d been standing long enough in the middle of the sidewalk. He shrugged his shoulders, scratched the nape of his neck, chewed on his lower lip and again lost himself in thought:

—He was damned if he could even begin to imagine how all this had suddenly come about! Was Mirel really serious about this?

He walked alongside her, reflecting on the divorce and on the new situation in which Mirel was now beginning to find herself. Sadness had now overcome them both, and both recalled the words that Mirel had only just uttered:

—Can you imagine, Montchik? I still have absolutely no idea what’ll become of me.

She didn’t even know where she’d go when she left the house after the divorce. Quite possibly for the first week she wouldn’t even have the wherewithal to see her through a day. But now she wasn’t at all afraid. The world seemed so extensive to her now. The day before, after the divorcebroker had left, she’d given a shriek of joy only because she’d reminded herself that she could wash in an enormous amount of cold water.

—She’d find somewhere to go when she left the Zaydenovskis’ house …

Her home in the shtetl … That home meant nothing to her now, and was merely a source of frustration. She had no attachment to her mother, and her father … it would be easier if she and her father lived apart from each other. They certainly couldn’t help each other, in any case.

She was thinking a great deal about herself; she’d always been used to thinking a great deal about herself.